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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.
Celebrate the Success of the ‘Oval Four’ – But Don’t Forget the Many Others Trapped in a Broken System
The overturning of the convictions of the ‘Oval Four’ by the Court of Appeal shows our under-funded and chaotic criminal justice system working. Unfortunately this is an exception not the rule
The history of the CCRC’s involvement with the Danny Major case is shameful. The organisation has a number of formidable weapons in its armoury to get to the bottom of cases of police corruption, including a statutory power to instruct an external police force to look at the work of another force.
The miscarriage of justice watchdog rejected the case in 2010. But Major and his family persuaded Greater Manchester Police to investigate what happened that night in the bloodied cells of Leeds Bridewell. They were forced to bypass the CCRC and instead persuaded their local Police and Crime Commissioner to back their fight. Eric and Bernadette Major re-mortgaged their home to pay £30,000 in lawyers’ fees to support their son – a debt that was paid back when Eric cashed in his pension on retiring from the police in 2011.
The CCRC compounded its initial disastrous error to reject the case by then failing to act upon the revelations of Operation Lamp. When Major clears his name – it’s difficult (sadly, not impossible) to imagine he won’t – it will be in spite of, and not because of, the miscarriage of justice watchdog.
“People have died in prison who should never have been there,” he says. “Many others continue to live and die with their names unjustly tarnished—reliant on a disorganised and dysfunctional body that has repeatedly demonstrated its incompetence.”
After everything Danny Major has gone through, he is still prepared to return to frontline policing (in his words) “if only to ensure that this cannot happen to anyone else”; although he concedes that 20 years of trauma might make that “an unrealistic expectation”.
The reason why he isn’t presently serving the people of West Yorkshire – and may never do so – is down to the CCRC.