Subscriptions
Read Our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
In the recent history of miscarriages of justice, the case of Danny Major is uniquely shocking. Whilst working as a police constable in 2003, he claims to have been fitted up by colleagues who had beaten up an 18-year-old detainee in Leeds Bridewell custody suite in the early hours of a Saturday morning. He believes his fellow officers conspired to pin the blame on him, a young constable six years into his policing career, when the teenager had to be rushed by ambulance to hospital because they thought he was going to die.
In 2013, Greater Manchester Police began a review into this appalling episode, optimistically called Operation Lamp. It’s been 10 years since I spoke to West Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Mark Burns-Williamson, who had commissioned the review.
Expecting to be brushed off, I was surprised to be told: “The evidence supports the premise that there may have been a miscarriage of justice and that there is sufficient fresh evidence to support the case being referred back to the [Court of Appeal] by the Criminal Case Review Commission (CCRC).”
Operation Lamp vindicated Danny Major.
“In 30 years in the police service, I’ve never seen a report as critical of one police force by another force,” said Chief Inspector Ian Hansen, chairman of the Greater Manchester Police Federation.
I wrote about Danny’s case six years ago for Byline Times. This month, the troubled miscarriage of justice watchdog finally referred the case to the Court of Appeal. Why the wait?
THE JUSTICE TRAP: Was a Police Officer Sacked and Jailed for a Violent Assault actually the Victim of a Cover-Up?
PC Danny Major spent four months in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit. Faced with an unhelpful and inactive miscarriages of justice watchdog, he is still fighting to clear his name.
It has been a devastating experience for Danny Major, his young family and parents. The only job Major could find on release was working in a call-centre where he manned the phones at a desk overlooking HMP Leeds where he served some of the four months he spent in prison; meanwhile, the three officers who he believes framed him progressed their careers.
Major gave up working after Operation Lamp. The stress was too much. For him to clear his name (like any innocent person claiming to be wrongly convicted), the CCRC has to send his case back to the Court of Appeal which has the power to overturn his conviction.
Last month, I was shocked to discover that the CCRC hadn’t done this. Major told me that the commission informed him last August a decision had been made – but they wouldn’t tell him whether it is good news or bad. He said his stress levels have never been as high as they were as a result of a 22-year injustice.
This month, the good news was confirmed.
The Post Office Scandal: Why Do Miscarriages of Justice Take So Long to Expose?
Veteran Crime Reporter Duncan Campbell examines the sad history of wrongful prosecutions and the decline of deeply researched investigations
Danny Major comes from a policing family. His father was a serving police officer for more than 30 years. Eric Major was almost killed when policing the miners’ strike, struck by flying masonry. The incident left him with a detached retina and brain injury. Ironically, Eric had briefly been a miner before joining the force. The family has now seen another side of our justice system. “I can take one corrupt police officer – you expect good and bad anywhere – but not a corrupt police force,” his late mother Bernadette told me six years ago.
What happened that night was never about one ‘rogue’ officer. There was no single ‘bad apple’. When sentencing Major in 2006, the judge told the court that a drunk teenager became a “non-person” for 40 minutes in a police station.
The CCRC was set up as a direct response to the actions of corrupt police officers who beat ‘confessions’ out of innocent Irish men (Birmingham Six and Guildford Four) half a century ago. In recent months, there has been increasing criticism of the watchdog. Its chair Helen Pitcher was finally forced to step down earlier this year over a refusal to take responsibility for the organisation’s serial failings over the exoneration of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. The CCRC’s mishandling of that case (they rejected it twice) meant that an innocent man stayed in prison unnecessarily for as many as 14 years.
The watchdog was established in 1997 with a single job to do: to send these difficult cases back to the Court of Appeal. The number of referrals being made by the CCRC crashed to a dozen in 2016 and 13 in 2018 from an unspectacular average of 33 a year. According to a new analysis by the academic Dr Stephen Heaton, the CCRC referred 227 cases in the last eight years. But, he argues the headline figures are misleading and distorted by group referrals (eg: 64 Post Office ‘Horizon’ cases). He believes that there have been just eight successful referrals made as a result of their own investigative efforts.