November 14, 2002
AS NEWS of her son’s release from prison reached her hospital bed in
Glasgow last night, Margaret Brown’s mind would inevitably have strayed
back to the afternoon in Manchester in October 1977 when she watched him
deprived of the prime of his adult life.
On that day, Robert Brown’s last recorded words in public after he was
convicted of the murder of Manchester spinster, Annie Walsh, were
simple. As he was taken down the steep narrow staircase into the cells
of Manchester Crown Court, he repeatedly screamed: "I am innocent, I am
innocent."
Mrs Brown, now 75, has never forgotten her son’s shouts echoing around
the packed public gallery.
For more than two decades, Mr Brown’s claim of innocence was ignored by
the authorities.
Robert Brown’s journey from the Drumchapel housing estate in Glasgow to
Manchester began in 1975 when he fled south to escape a life of physical
abuse in children’s homes around his home city.
No stranger to the wrong side of the law, Mr Brown, at 17, was already a
drifter who struggled to hold down a job. Manchester, he hoped, would
offer him a clean slate.
Once there, Mr Brown struggled to fit in but after two years of scraping
by he had found himself a girlfriend, a part-time job and a run-down
flat in the Hulme area in the south of the city. For the first time in
his life he was making plans for the future.
In Hulme in early 1977, the street talk in the notorious red-bricked
slum was dominated by one topic - the murder of a local spinster, Annie
Walsh, who was bludgeoned to death in the front room of her terraced
home on 28 January.
As the police investigation of the Walsh case intensified, Mr Brown’s
attention was brought to a series of wanted posters for the murderer
featuring an artist’s impression of a spiky-haired youth which led him
to joke that the police were hunting for the rock star Rod Stewart.
By Manchester CID’s own admission, the artist’s impression of a known
local criminal was "a flyer". They were more interested in the testimony
of another neighbour who told the police that shortly before the murder
she had heard the victim speaking to a man with a Scottish or Irish
accent.
On the morning of 18 May, nearly four months after the murder of Annie
Walsh, detectives set out early to apprehend another individual who had
come to their attention. It was Mr Brown, then 19, whom a local police
mole claimed "had a history of violence".
Following his arrest, Mr Brown later claimed that six policemen took 30
hours to break him down; and that he was threatened, intimidated, mocked,
refused access to a lawyer, made to strip and shown a pair of unfamiliar,
blood-soaked jeans allegedly taken from his home which he was told
proved his guilt.
At the end of the ordeal, during which he claimed he was denied sleep, a
printed confession was placed in front of him. Half blind from fatigue,
he scrawled his name on the sheet and collapsed on the table.
Mr Brown’s trial at Manchester Crown Court was, by all accounts, a farce,
but the judge told the jury that to find in his favour would be to
accuse six policemen of lying. On the strength of the confession alone,
the jury found Mr Brown guilty and the judge sentenced him to a minimum
of 15 years. For the next quarter of a century Mr Brown was to be the
victim of Britain’s longest-running miscarriage of justice.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, Mr Brown’s solicitors continued to argue not
only that a confession had been forced out of their client under duress
but that no valid motive was given for the crime during the trial.
Despite police claims that robbery had been the main reason behind Miss
Walsh’s murder, her purse and an envelope containing her wages had
remained untouched at the murder scene.
Even when he was eligible for parole in 1988, Mr Brown refused to apply
for his freedom and continued to plead his innocence. Like Stephen
Downing, he was classified by the Home Office as being IDOM - in denial
of murder - and not even an impressive list of prison governors, guards
and psychiatrists supporting his claims of innocence looked like winning
him parole.
But earlier this year dramatic new academic evidence emerged to support
Mr Brown’s claims that his "confession" was indeed the result of a
question and answer session conducted under duress. Professor Malcolm
Coulthard, a linguistics expert based at the University of Birmingham,
was commissioned by the Criminal Cases Review Commission to examine the
case.
In his report, Prof Coulthard concluded: "In my opinion, it is likely
that the statement was produced, at least in part, by a process of
police questions and Brown’s answers being converted into and written
down as monologue." Mr Brown’s lawyers also uncovered evidence of a
"culture of corruption and cover ups" within Greater Manchester Police
around the time of his arrest, focusing on one of the arresting
officers, Detective Chief Inspector Jack Butler, later convicted of
corruption.
Mr Brown’s case for freedom was sealed yesterday when, on the strength
of reports of police corruption within Greater Manchester Police and the
evidence of Prof Coulthard, he was dramatically freed by three judges at
the Court of Appeal in London, who ruled that the guilty verdict against
him "could no longer be regarded as safe".
As she continued her battle against cancer in a Glasgow hospital, Mrs
Brown heard her son speak as a free man for the first time in 25 years -
nurses at her bedside claimed the widow was too overwhelmed to speak on
the phone, she just listened to her son’s cries of jubilation.
High-profile releases
THE most recent high-profile miscarriages of justice have all come under
the scrutiny of the Criminal Cases Review Commission:
1991: The Birmingham Six, Paddy Joe Hill, Hugh Callaghan, Richard
McIlkenny, Gerry Hunter, Billy Power and Johnny Walker, were freed after
spending more than 16 years in prison for the murder of 22 people in
1974. The Court of Appeal quashed their convictions after finding that
evidence against them had been fabricated.
2001: Three people convicted of killing
newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater in 1978, James Robinson, Michael Hickey
and Vincent Hickey, were released after it emerged the fourth suspect,
who later died in jail, had been tricked by police into signing a
confession.
2002: In January Stephen Downing had his life
sentence quashed after spending 27 years in prison for the 1973 murder
of Wendy Sewell in Bakewell, Derbyshire.
Downing, who was 17 when he was convicted had been
found guilty by a jury on the strength of his own confession. The
decision was later over-ruled when appeal judges were told Downing had a
mental age of 11 when he signed his admission.
