In December 2019 the false, racially motivated convictions of three of the ‘Oval Four’ – Winston Trew, Stirling Christie and George Griffiths – were overturned after nearly 50 years of struggle to prove their innocence. This is a damning indictment of Britain’s racist ‘justice’ system. The fourth member, Constantine ‘Omar’ Boucher, has only recently been in contact with the Criminal Cases Review Commission but is due to have his case referred to appeal. DESPINE DOHMAN reports.
Trew, Christie, Griffiths and Boucher were all members of the Fasimbas (Young Lions), the youth wing of the South East London Parents’ Organisation, a black community group, whose activism included assisting with formal education provision for children in reading, and teaching children of Caribbean immigrants about their rich cultural and historical legacies. On the night of their arrest in March 1972 they were on their way back from a meeting in north London.
The assault was led by Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell of the British Transport Police, with a number of other plainclothes police officers. After assaulting the four men without reason, Ridgewell (a former member of the white supremacist South Rhodesian Police) and his officers arrested and charged them with attempted theft, theft and assaulting a police officer. While held overnight at Kennington police station, the men were beaten and forced to sign false confessions.
Ridgewell headed up an informal ‘Mugging Unit’ on the Northern Line; ‘mugging’ being a deeply racialised term imported from the US. Ridgewell had a documented habit of setting upon young black men, accusing them of attempted theft and, if they resisted arrest, adding the charge of police assault. He became such a liability that he was later quietly moved to a different area, investigating mailbag fraud. It was in this new job that Ridgewell was arrested and subsequently imprisoned for conspiracy to steal mailbags worth £300,000 (around £1.3m in today’s money).
Following their forced false confessions, Trew, Christie and Griffiths were sentenced to two years in prison. After a local defence campaign and appeal, their sentences were reduced to eight months. The appeal court judge said he hoped they would appreciate the ‘gravity’ of their offences and this reduction was not to be interpreted as an act of weakness.
While the more recent 2019 appeal judicial comments at least attempt to rectify the gross injustice done to the Oval Four, stating that it is ‘clear that these convictions are unsafe’ and that the evidence of Ridgewell and his cronies was fundamentally unreliable, they still do not address the underlying racism behind the case.
The 47-year fight for justice for the Oval Four demonstrates how the bourgeois ‘justice’ system takes so long to make decisions in order to drain the rightful anger of the working class and oppressed. There are many other examples of this, including Hillsborough, Bloody Sunday and Grenfell. Britain’s so-called ‘justice’ system cannot be relied upon to provide real justice and democracy for the working and racially oppressed masses; it protects first the interests of the bourgeoisie, then defends its ‘special bodies of armed men’, and only then, if it absolutely must, does it give a semblance of justice to the masses.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 274 February/March 2020
