Two years ago, the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission), the last resort for those who have been unfairly convicted of crimes they did not commit, was often criticised for its failures. The case of Andrew Malkinson had hit the headlines, and an independent review by Chris Henley KC found that errors by the body had effectively delayed his chances of release by a decade. I admit to having given up on them. This article originally appeared in Inside Time.
At a meeting of the Commons Justice Committee on 29 April 2025, the MPs were scathing of the CCRC’s work. Their report, published in May 2025, called for “root and branch reform.” Dame Vera Baird was appointed as interim Chair, and she arrived with many years of experience across the criminal justice system. She told Inside Time she was a defence barrister at the start of her career in the law and would ensure that all applications would be reviewed in the way a defence barrister would consider them, looking for flaws in the prosecution case and the court hearings. She would, she told me, ensure her team believe the applicant until they find cause that they should not.
I have interviewed her twice and met her at many meetings of groups campaigning for changes in the law, and for justice. Dame Vera speaks her mind, and displays those positive attitudes of a defence barrister. Since her appointment there have been major changes in the work of the organisation. It has had success getting complex cases reviewed and overturned by the Court of Appeal. There are many people I know who still feel that controversial cases are resolved too slowly, and I understand and sympathise with their frustration, but just want to run through some of the work the CCRC is doing that is in fact demonstrating the approach Dame Vera outlines, and a creating a path to law changes.
All four of the themes to which I refer reflect outcomes where campaigners have called for fundamental changes in the law. In effect, the work of the CCRC in these areas demonstrates to the Government that such changes are necessary. I have not prioritised them, but below you will find ‘Trew’s Law’ for victims of corrupt police officers; survivors of grooming who were coerced into crime; Imprisonment for Public Protection; and Joint Enterprise.
Proving the need for Trew’s Law
Campaign organisation Appeal, which challenges miscarriages of justice, has called for an automatic review of case files for people convicted based on evidence given by police officers who later were convicted of crimes. It has been named Trew’s Law, after Winston Trew of the Oval Four, a group who were framed by a corrupt police officer 50 years ago. The officer was later convicted of theft and found to have deliberately framed young Black men. He has since died.
The campaign wants to see automatic reviews of all cases involving police officers later found to have engaged in serious misconduct. Charity APPEAL claims that systemic failures that enabled these injustices have never been fully addressed in law. Its report, titled ‘Trew’s Law: The Case for Automatic Reviews of Imprisoned Police Officers’ Files for Miscarriages of Justice’, lays out all the arguments.
In total, the CCRC has referred an astonishing 15 cases related to this one corrupt officer, Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell of the British Transport Police, to the Court of Appeal. Just recently, two more men convicted of theft half a century ago have had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal. In April 1976, Christopher Poulter and Kevin Biggs were convicted of theft of 13 mailbags and their contents at Inner London Crown Court, alongside their co-defendant Stephen Simmons. Mr Poulter was given a 12-month prison sentence and Mr Biggs was sentenced to borstal training.
DS Ridgewell engaged in a series of arrests and convictions in which it was later discovered he had framed innocent people, particularly young Black men, for offences caused by his own criminality. In 1980 he was jailed for seven years after stealing more than £1 million of goods in transit. He died in prison two years later.
And whilst the work of the CCRC on these cases is superb and the results gratifying, Mr Poulter and Mr Biggs had never previously appealed their convictions because they received legal advice that they had no grounds to do so. Mr Poulter applied to the CCRC last November only after being spoken to by British Transport Police because of its own live investigation into DS Ridgewell’s misconduct. The CCRC also received an application in February 2026 on behalf of Mr Biggs, who died in 2004.
And that quoted legal advice shows why Trew’s Law is so important. After a case is over, once people are locked away in prison or even after they are out trying to get on with their lives, they and their previous legal teams probably will not know that the officer on whose evidence they were sent away has been discovered to have been crooked. Once an officer is convicted of a crime, as APPEAL’s draft legislation says, all the cases in which they were involved should be fully investigated by an independent party, and scrutinised. These reviews may find that, as the individuals lied in their own cases for personal gain, they may have lied in others for promotion and acclaim from their colleagues.
The CCRC have, in my view, demonstrated the need for Trew’s Law, beyond reasonable doubt. CCRC Chair Dame Vera Baird KC has called on others, in prison or out of prison, who were convicted of crimes they did not commit on the back of evidence from DS Ridgewell to contact the CCRC. The Government should look to introduce Trew’s Law, for the benefit of all convicted on tainted police evidence, as a matter of urgency.
Grooming gang survivors are not criminals
Another priority that Dame Vera described to me was cases of survivors of grooming gangs who were forced or coerced into committing crimes by their abusers. She said: “We now have a better understanding of the devastating impact that exploitation, coercion and control can have on a young person’s ability to make free choices.” She told me about a case that they had referred to the Court of Appeal that succeeded. She said the CCRC has since received other applications concerning grooming gangs and now has a “body of in-house expertise” to help with them.
Because of their work, the conviction of one woman in 2002, who was then14, was quashed. The woman, referred to as Ms AB from the north-west of England, received a non-custodial sentence after being convicted of being carried in a stolen motor vehicle, possessing an imitation firearm and assault. The convictions have now been overturned because the prosecution that followed her arrest may have amounted to an abuse of process.
The CCRC’s investigation found compelling evidence that, at the time of the offences, Ms AB had been the victim of child sexual exploitation and grooming. During an interview with the CCRC the woman explained how a man would bring food to her house, flatter her, and make her feel special. Within months, the interactions with the man became sexual, and she was encouraged to have sex with his friends. She explained he would use violence and emotional blackmail to get her to comply.
The CCRC referral followed publication of Baroness Casey’s review which highlighted widespread institutional failings in protecting children from grooming gangs. This was the first case referred by the Commission involving the convictions of a grooming gang victim in light of those findings.
Dame Vera said: “One can only lament the lack of insight, in particular, from the police at the time, that she was prosecuted, when she should have been protected. She would have had no choice but to plead guilty at the magistrates’ court, which she did, exactly as she had no choice but to commit the offences, since she was, at both times, in the grip of a groomer. Our investigation concluded there was a real possibility that, because of those failures, her prosecution amounted to an abuse of process. The Crown Prosecution Service has now reached the same conclusion and did not oppose the application. We are grateful to them for their careful consideration of Ms AB’s case.”
She added: “Many children who were victims of grooming and sexual exploitation were treated as offenders rather than children in need of protection. We will always be ready to talk with such applicants with the help of a trauma-informed member of a trafficking charity or anyone else who the applicant would like to be with them, so that there is a lesser risk of re-traumatising them by the need to re-visit, perhaps, long-ago times which they will remember potentially with great pain. People do not have to approach us on their own; they can ask a solicitor, charity or support organisation to help them make an application.”
I found it quite astonishing that, now that we understand how grooming happens and the damage it does, there are still women who were known to be groomed and coerced into crime who have offences under that pressure on their records. It is a throwback to times of ignorance, and unfortunately an indication that the noise around grooming is not about the fact it exists, but because so many for racist reasons want to pretend it is a matter of race or religion. It certainly is not. Most people are aware that it is only recently that the police have been told to believe the survivors, where before that they all too often ignored them. However, before that, the survivors were blamed for promiscuity, whilst the perpetrators were just boys being boys, men being men.
I learnt about grooming when I was 12 years old, though it was not known as that then. A girl in my class, and who had gone to the same primary school as me, was known to be having sex with a 16-year-old. She had never been in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, unlike many, and, unknown to anyone, her father had walked out on her mother. That was never discussed in the mid-1960s. So, when this school pupil, four years older than her, who was head of a middle-class wannabee motorcycle gang, picked her up and told her that all girls with a boyfriend had sex, she believed him. He then told everyone that they were lovers; she became a pariah in the class. Everyone shunned her, including teachers and school staff, but she was a friend so I insisted she would work on joint classroom projects with me. My other friends, grudgingly, accepted that.
He was 16. It was illegal. Yet the school blamed her for promiscuity. She told me that there were six in his gang, and three girls. The gang shared them out between them from time to time, and as they were selling smuggled or stolen fags and tobacco to local shops on behalf of adults, who also shared the girls, they would have to “entertain” new clients. She was drinking gin by then, and they arranged for an IUD to be fitted in a backstreet room. The school and the pupils condemned her, and yet the abuser was eventually allowed to stay on in the sixth form for an additional year as he came from a nice upper middle-class family. He and his group were never caught conducting his pathetic efforts to be a criminal whilst using her and the other girls, or she too might have got a criminal record.
I had just turned 13 when she told me her full story. Every survivor’s story is different, but they all involve being used and abused, and disregarded. I am glad we have moved from blaming the girls for their ‘immorality’, through a time of refusing to believe their stories, and on to recognising them as having been just plain abused. The next step has to be to wipe any criminal records from their personal histories, and if that is done by legislation more survivors will come forwards and culprits will be identified.
I would add that there are men in prison who were groomed by criminal gangs after being failed by their schools, victims of modern slavery. Their cases need review too. Young people with a troubled and unsettled home life are vulnerable, male and female. Surely, we know that now. I still speak with my friend who I know struggled past her appalling memories, found she could not have children, but married a widower with kids. They share a happy life. He does not know about her past, and so when she suffers flashbacks, she rings me, we meet, and talk, and see her through it. I am not a vindictive person, but I do hope the wannabee motorcycle gangster failed through life in the way he failed at school, and that he got no more second chances from others as the school gave him even though they knew he was engaging in illegal, underage, sex.
IPPs, DPPs, and Joint Enterprise
I am not going to go into great detail on these cases, because I have written about them so often. I assume that anyone reading this will be aware that the CCRC have been forwarding cases to the Court of Appeal of people who were given sentences when they were young of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) or Detention for Public Protection (DPP), and asking the appeal judges to take the IPP/DPP off. They have referred 25 cases, including nine just sent.
The new referrals concern people convicted between 2005 and 2011, all but one of whom remain in custody despite none having been given a minimum tariff of over six years. In one ruling delivered in April this year, the Court of Appeal quashed five indefinite sentences. Other cases are pending.
In its detailed report on IPP back in 2022, the Commons Justice Committee recommended that everyone on an IPP sentence should be resentenced. The Howard League has proposed an alternative, which is that all those in jail should be given a fixed date for release, and that appropriate support be in place to help them through their new life outside.
Many serving IPP sentences have mental, and indeed physical, health needs caused by the stress of not having a fixed release date. At last count, 856 had been inside since before IPP was scrapped 14 years ago. They have been through periods of hope, such as when the sentence was abolished in 2012 and when the Justice Committee completed its inquiry in 2022. All of them had those hopes shattered.
The Prime Minister has said this shall end, but a new cross-party group is suggested to look at it. Given that the shadow justice secretary says that those on IPP have been rejected by Parole Boards because they are “dangerous”, that may be difficult. Should he read this, I would remind him they were rejected because they could not prove they will not reoffend, not because of danger, and it is impossible to prove a negative. Even Nick Timothy would be pushed, if in front of a parole panel, to prove he will never commit an offence, because nobody can prove what they will or won’t do in the future, regardless of what they have done in the past. IPP must end now.
And there must be changes to the prosecutions and reviews of verdicts under Joint Enterprise, another priority of the CCRC under Dame Vera. Cases have been referred to the Court of Appeal which the CCRC found were based on the “gang narrative”, which is discredited, and which the CPS is also, apparently, reviewing. The Westminster Commission on Joint Enterprise is to report some time this autumn, and the Law Commission is questioning the fairness of the concept, but more needs to be done.
There is also a very active campaign, ‘Art, Not Evidence’, challenging the use of rap as proof that the composer was in some way linked to the crime described. After all, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote the dramatic poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ but was never accused of being responsible or involved, even though he wrote it very soon after the military disaster. Plus, and surely it is significant, the Supreme Court in 2016 said that Joint Enterprise had taken a wrong turn, and you would think their views were of some significance, but it has made no difference.
The right direction
When I reported on the CCRC at the Justice Committee in late April 2025, it seemed to be going backwards. I believe that the appointment of Dame Vera Baird has turned it around. Of course, people will be unhappy at the time it takes for decisions to be taken and with some results in their own cases, but I feel that there has been progress and that it will continue. I believe the CCRC – in its approach and its success on cases involving police corruption, survivors of grooming gangs, IPP and Joint Enterprise – is setting a path for the legislators to follow. It is proving that those who have been campaigning are right, and that terrible injustices must be corrected. Its successes show that they certainly can be.
Dame Vera told me that it seems as though the Government wants the CCRC to solve IPP one case at a time, but that is not acceptable. Nor is it acceptable to solve the other wrongs in that way, but precedents have been set, and now it is up to politicians to right these injustices once and for all.
However, to give back a proper life back to those who have been wronged, support in the community is required. That cannot be the responsibility of Probation. A fully-funded mentoring structure is required, as well as, where required, access to medical support. The system failed far too many people for years. The new Prime Minister cannot fail them again. It would be intolerable.
