Man wrongly jailed for three years charged £7,000 by Home Office for ‘board and lodging’
May 30th, 2007 Egghead
I’m just going to repost this one without comment. It speaks for itself more eloquently than I possibly could. Click the headline below for the original and for reader comments.
Man wrongly jailed for three years charged £7,000 by Home Office for ‘board and lodging’
By SAM GREENHILL
Last updated at 22:00pm on 27th May 2007
Wrongly jailed after a woman cried rape, Warren Blackwell applied for compensation for his three wasted years in prison.
Torn from his family and sent to languish in jail as a convicted sex attacker, the innocent father-of-two imagined he was due a hefty sum for the miscarriage of justice.
Instead, he was flabbergasted to learn the Home Office now intends to charge him nearly £7,000 for “board and lodging”.
The money is for the cost of food and accommodation while he was behind bars, and will be deducted from whatever compensation he receives for wrongly imprisonment.
Mr Blackwell, 37, said: “I can’t believe it, they’ve got to be joking. They are going to charge me for my porridge!
“I’ve had a letter stating that they have accepted my claim for compensation, and that the actual amount is to be decided by an assessor. But they are going to deduct £6,800 for living expenses incurred during my three years and four months behind bars.
“Apparently it’s money I would have spent in normal day life, had I not been in prison.”
Mr Blackwell was jailed in 1999 on the evidence of a woman who had a history of making false claims against blameless men. He was cleared at the Appeal Court in September last year after her background was exposed.
He said: “It’s absolutely ludicrous. They accept they put me in prison wrongly, and accept I’m due compensation.
“Then they turn around and say, ‘Thank you for your stay with us, hope you didn’t miss your family too much during three years in the clanger, now off you go – oh, and here’s your bill.’”
He added: “I’m going to challenge it on the grounds of discrimination. I mean, burglars and murderers who actually did commit a crime, and deserve to be in jail, don’t get charged for being in prison. So why charge me?”
He said the ruling amounted to the guilty staying in jail for free, while the innocent are charged.
“I was jailed not just for a crime I didn’t do, but for one that never even happened in the first place. She made the whole thing up, as was accepted by the High Court.”
Mr Blackwell’s ordeal began when his accuser, now 39, claimed she had been seized with a knife outside a village club early on New Year’s Day 1999, taken to an alley and indecently assaulted.
She picked him out of an identity parade and a jury found him guilty, even though there was no forensic evidence and he had no previous convictions. His wife Tanya never doubted his innocence.
Eventually, the case was investigated by the Criminal Cases Review Commission which found his accuser had fabricated at least seven other allegations of sexual and physical assault. She frequently changed her name and police forces did not realise they were dealing with the same woman.
Mr Blackwell, from Woodford Halse, Northamptonshire, said he has asked his solicitor to consider appealing under Article 14 of the Human Rights Act, which relates to discrimination.
He said: “It’s a pretty clear case of discrimination, wouldn’t you say? If they are going to bill me for my porridge then they should charge all the other inmates as well.”
His solicitor, Robert Berg, said: “He didn’t ask to go to prison. It adds insult to injury to bill him for his time inside.
“It follows a House of Lords ruling which said that claims for compensation for wrongful imprisonment will incur a weekly £40 deduction for board and lodging.
“I can’t see the logic. If he had not been wrongly imprisoned, he would have been at home with his family, going to work and earning a living and paying his mortgage.
“Why should he bear the cost of a punishment he didn’t even deserve?”
Mr Blackwell’s compensation is still being decided by the independent assessor, who will take into account factors such as loss of earnings and damage to reputation.
The final figure is likely to be in excess of £100,000. From that he will almost certainly deduct “rent” and living costs, said the Ministry of Justice.
A spokesman said: “It has been standard practice to do this in miscarriage of justice cases since the Criminal Appeals Act 1995 came into force.
“The assessor usually deducts a small amount of rent and living expenses of being in prison from the much, much higher figure of the actual compensation.”
The practice of charging “bed and breakfast” was challenged this year by the Bridgewater Three, the men wrongly convicted of murdering newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater in 1978.
But the Lords upheld the principle, meaning Mr Blackwell would have to go the European Court of Human Rights for any hope of overturning it.
