Interview with Michael O’Brien
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 153, February/March 2000
In 1989, 18-year-old Darren Hall was questioned by South Wales police about the murder of a Cardiff newsagent. After three days chained to a radiator in a police cell without food and water, he confessed to a crime he had not committed, and named Ellis Sherwood, 19, and Michael O’Brien, 20, as his accomplices. Sherwood and O’Brien were held for 36 hours and lied about their whereabouts to cover up the fact that they had been stealing a car at the time of the murder.
It took over ten years for the ‘Cardiff Newsagent Three’ to clear their names. They were released from prison in Dec-ember 1998, when the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred their case back to the Court of Appeal, and the court finally quashed their convictions on 25 January 2000.
Michael O’Brien told FRFI how the police fabricated evidence against them to back up Darren Hall’s false confession, and how the trial became a foregone conclusion: ‘I knew we had lost before we even came to 1 trial. I watched it happen in front of my eyes’.
Once inside Michael O’Brien began to study law: ‘I stood up for my rights and those of other prisoners. In Gartree I won 18 adjudications for other prisoners and five for myself.’
Michael was punished for his resistance: ‘They beat me physically and they screwed me up mentally. I got up in the mornings and wondered what they were going to do to me today. I was shipped over 300 miles to Frankland, so that my family couldn’t visit. They tried to isolate me. They physically assaulted me in full view of visitors, including the BBC journalist Karen Voisey.’
When his father died, Michael was given compassion-ate leave to attend the funeral. Never missing a chance to demoralise those who fight back, the police turned out fully armed and in riot vans.
Support for the Cardiff News-agent Three’s campaign for jus-tice grew and the breakthrough came when the BBC TV current affairs programme Week-in, Week-out covered the case, correlating evidence of their innocence.
Initially, journalist Karen Voisey was denied access to Michael. This led to a series of court cases to determine whether serving prisoners are allowed to be visited by journalists. Home Secretaries Michael Howard and Jack Straw both opposed this right, but the House of Lords finally ruled in the prisoners’ favour last year.
Michael’s advice to prisoners who are denied press visits is to instruct a solicitor to seek a judicial review of that decision. ‘You can force the High Court to honour the House of Lords decision. It was quite a precise ruling. They can draw up a dis-claimer to say you can’t talk about named prison officers and security matters, but that’s it. I heard that in Winston Silcott’s case they brought in an assistant governor and a press officer from the Prison Service Head-quarters. That is contrary to the House of Lords ruling.’
It took the CCRC three years to review the new evidence broadcast on the BBC programme in 1996. ‘I had a lot of problems with the CCRC. There should have been an independent body investigating our case. But they got an outside police force to investigate. They still have a freemason working on the CCRC; he can’t be independent. Unless your case is high profile in the media, the CCRC can get away with ignoring it.’
‘Inside prisons in this country, there is systematic abuse of human rights and civil rights. Prison officers are like the police but they get away with it even more because they operate behind tightly closed doors. Just look at the number of deaths in custody. There should be a public inquiry into how these prisons are murdering people.’
Michael’s advice to other innocent prisoners is not to give up. ‘You’ve got to fight all the way. No one else will do it for you. Study your case and ‘know it inside out. Then study the law, find out what they convicted you for and which laws they broke.’
Michael himself hasn’t ended his struggle for justice since being released. He has been travelling around Britain and Ireland, speaking at meetings and giving interviews. `People need to hear about this stuff.’
He is particularly concerned about Martin O’Halloran, who has served 20 years, suffered several strokes and is now in a wheelchair. The CCRC is looking into his case, but unless they speed up, Martin may be another fatality of the British justice system.
Helen Burnes
