Skip Navigation | Sheffield IMC | UK IMC | Editorial Guidelines | Mission Statement | About Us | Contact | Help | Support Us

UK Indymedia UK Indymedia Sheffield Indymedia Sheffield Indymedia

Proof that Blunkett is bonkers

steve | 26.03.2004 19:46 | Repression | Sheffield

If you ever wondered about the sanity of Sheffield MP David Blunkett this article should clarify things. Blunkett is blind but his lack of sight is not the problem. It's the empty space behind his eyes where his brain should reside that is causing the man the most difficulties.

We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That’ll be £80,000 please

Blunkett charges miscarriage of justice victims ‘food and lodgings’

By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor

 http://www.sundayherald.com/40592/


WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending
the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a
crime they didn’t commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if
you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is
simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and
lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s
Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in
London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice
more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly
convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in
prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation
grey blankets.

Blunkett’s fight has been described as “outrageous”, “morally
repugnant” and the “sickest of sick jokes”, but his spokesmen in the
Home Office say it’s a completely “reasonable course of action” as
the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food
and lodgings if they weren’t in prison. The government deems the
claw-back ‘Saved Living Expenses’.

Paddy Hill was one of the Birmingham Six. He spent 16 years behind
bars for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings by the IRA. Hill now lives
on a farm with his wife and children near Beith in Scotland. He has
been charged £50,000 for living expenses by the Home Office.

It wasn’t until two years ago that Hill was finally awarded £960,000
in compensation. However, during the years since his release, while
waiting for the pay-out, the government had given him advances of
around £300,000. When his compensation came through, the £300,000 was
taken back along with interest on the interim payments charged at 23%
– that cost him a further £70,000.

“The whole system is absurd,” Hill said. “I’m so angry about what has
happened to me. I try and tell people about being charged for bed and
board in jail and they can’t believe it.

“When I left prison I was given no training for freedom – no
counselling or psychological preparation. Yet the guilty get that
when they are released. To charge me for the food I ate and the cell
I slept in is almost as big an injustice as fitting me up in the
first place.

“While I was in prison, my family lost their home, yet they get no
compensation. But the state wants its money back. It’s like being
kicked in the head when someone has beat you already.

“I have to put up with this, yet there has not been one police
officer convicted of fitting people up. The Home Office had no
shortage of money to keep me in jail or to run a charade of a trial.

“But they had enough money to frame me. Nevertheless, when it comes
to paying out compensation for ruining my life they happily rip me to
shreds.”

Hill is not leading the legal action against the government – instead
he has handed the baton to another high-profile victim of miscarriage
of justice: Mike O’Brien.

O’Brien spent 10 years in jail wrongly convicted of killing a Cardiff
newsagent. His baby daughter died while he was in prison and he was
charged £37,500 by the Home Office for his time behind bars.

Hill said he cannot lead the legal fight as the Birmingham Six have
fought every legal action together, but now three of them are over 70
and Hill believes it is too much to ask them to join him in taking on
the government yet again.

He said he was also worried about the compensation payments for the
other members of the Birmingham Six being affected if they joined him
in court against the government.

“The establishment hate me and people like me as we proved them
wrong,” he said. “They either want to ignore us or hurt us.”

O’Brien took the Home Office to court last March and won, but
Blunkett appealed the decision. On Tuesday, the rights and wrongs of
the government policy will be decided at the Royal Courts.

O’Brien said: “Morally, the position of the government is just
outrageous. It shows total contempt for the victims of miscarriages
of justice. It makes me livid.

“I really believe if we win the appeal this week, the government is
evil enough to take me to the House of Lords. They are trying to
break us. I really think this is personal as far as the government is
concerned.

“A government really can’t get much worse than this. But I am
confident that we will win as the law and morality are on our side.”

Vincent Hickey, one of the Bridgewater Four who was wrongly convicted
for killing a paperboy, was charged £60,000 for the 17 years he spent
in jail. He said: “If I had known this I would have stayed on
hunger-strike longer, that way I would have had a smaller bill.”

John McManus, of the Scottish Miscarriage of Justice Organisation,
said: “This is reprehensible. How can we call ourselves a democratic,
civilised society when our government is acting like this?

“The government seems intent on punishing innocent people. The state
wants to be paid for making a mistake. It’s hard to believe someone
actually thought this policy up. If you tell a child about this they
will think it insane.

“Only a sick mind could have invented this policy, yet the government
is fighting to retain the right to act like this. It is cruelty with
intent. They seem to want to punish people for having the audacity to
be innocent.”

The SNP’s shadow justice minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said: “This is
outrageous. It is another assault by Blunkett on the rule of law and
on civil liberties. These people didn’t chose to go to prison. They
were wrongly convicted, and to charge them for it beggars belief.”

The Home Office said an “independent assessor appointed by the Home
Secretary takes into acccount the range of costs the prisoner might
have incurred had they not been imprisoned”. The spokes man said the
assessor was “right” to do this, adding: “Morally, this is reasonable
and appropriate.”

‘I was a hostage, now they are billing me’
ROBERT Brown was just a 19-year-old from Glasgow when he was jailed
for life for murdering a woman called Annie Walsh in Manchester in
1977. He served 25 years before he was finally freed in 2002, when
the courts ruled him innocent of the crime.
He is now facing a bill of around £80,000 for the living expenses he
cost the state. For Brown, it is the final straw. An interim payment
he was given pending his full compensation offer is exhausted; his
mother recently died; his relationship with his girlfriend has fallen
apart and he is facing eviction from his home following a mix-up over
benefits.

“I feel like ending my life,” he says. “I’ve tried to maintain my
dignity, but the state has treated me with nothing but contempt – now
they are asking me for money for my bed and board in jail.

“I never contemplated suicide once while I was in prison, but it’s
different on the outside. I have received no counselling or support.
Society is treating me like something you’d wipe off the bottom of
your shoes, but I’m an innocent man and a victim of a terrible
injustice.

“It’s horrific. I’ve been out of jail for 14 months and in that time
the state has put me through a war of attrition that it never needed
to conduct. I feel my life is disintegrating around me.

“Making me pay for my bed and board is abhorrent. I was arrested,
fitted up and held hostage for 25 years and now they are going to
charge me for being kept as their prisoner against my will.

“Can you think of a more disgusting way to abuse someone? I really
feel that my heart is truly and finally broken.”

steve

Comments

Hide the following 5 comments

*!*!*!*! outrageous!!

26.03.2004 22:15

How much longer will the people keep their mouths open saying 'yes, more shit please!

Fight Back!!

Krayzy


scum

26.03.2004 22:19

should not keep bad company

tony dean


What?

27.03.2004 14:16

Scum shouldn't keep bad company, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?!

Steve


Stunning

29.03.2004 01:17

its funny.... the farther i get through life, the less surprises me, and i thought i'd heard it all from our present "government" .... but this.... this is just stunning.

Has this been all over the news lately ? (i've been abroad and i havent watched tv in over a year)...

bubba


Absolute power corrupts absolutely

30.09.2004 12:13

The New world order requires that we be subjugated and utterly defeated. Having abandoned the pretence of democracy and creating the phoney war on terror they will consolidate their power in the kind of outrages detailed here. They believe in a world of wolves and sheep, but what they don’t get is the fact that compassion is the greatest weapon we have against them, don’t let them turn you to hate cos that’s what they want.

David Rowan
mail e-mail: rowan22tree@tiscali.co.uk


Kollektives

Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World

Other UK IMCs
Bristol/South West
London
Northern Indymedia
Scotland

Sheffield Topics

Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista

Sheffield [navigation.actions2016]

Sheffield [navigation.actions2015]

Sheffield [navigation.actions2014]

NATO 2014

Sheffield Actions 2013

G8 2013

Sheffield Actions 2012

Workfare

Sheffield Actions 2011

2011 Census Resistance
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Occupy Everywhere

Sheffield Actions 2010

Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands

Sheffield Actions 2009

COP15 Climate Summit 2009
G20 London Summit
Guantánamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
University Occupations for Gaza

Sheffield Actions 2008

2008 Days Of Action For Autonomous Spaces
Campaign against Carmel-Agrexco
Climate Camp 2008
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Smash EDO
Stop Sequani Animal Testing
Stop the BNP's Red White and Blue festival

Sheffield Actions 2007

Climate Camp 2007
DSEi 2007
G8 Germany 2007
Mayday 2007
No Border Camp 2007

Sheffield Actions 2006

April 2006 No Borders Days of Action
Art and Activism Caravan 2006
Climate Camp 2006
Faslane
French CPE uprising 2006
G8 Russia 2006
Lebanon War 2006
March 18 Anti War Protest
Mayday 2006
Oaxaca Uprising
Refugee Week 2006
Rossport Solidarity
SOCPA
Transnational Day of Action Against Migration Controls
WSF 2006

Sheffield Actions 2005

DSEi 2005
G8 2005
WTO Hong Kong 2005

Sheffield Actions 2004

European Social Forum
FBI Server Seizure
May Day 2004
Venezuela

Sheffield Actions 2003

Bush 2003
DSEi 2003
Evian G8
May Day 2003
No War F15
Saloniki Prisoner Support
Thessaloniki EU
WSIS 2003

Server Appeal Radio Page Video Page Indymedia Cinema Offline Newsheet

secure Encrypted Page

You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.

If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

IMCs


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech