David Jessel | |
|---|---|
| Born | David Greenhalgh Jessel 1945 (age 78–79) Abingdon, Berkshire, England |
| Occupation | Journalist Writer |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Dragon School Eton College |
| Alma mater | Merton College, Oxford |
| Parents | Robert Jessel and Penelope Jessel |
| Relatives | Stephen Jessel (brother) |
David Greenhalgh Jessel (born 8 November 1945)[ citation needed ] is a British former TV and radio news presenter, author, and campaigner against miscarriages of justice. From 2000 to 2010, he was also a commissioner of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
David Jessel is the son of Robert Jessel, a former defence correspondent of The Times (London), and Dame Penelope Jessel, [1] and the brother of journalist Stephen Jessel.
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(July 2019) |
David Jessel was born in Abingdon and educated at the Dragon School, an independent school in Oxford, and at Eton College, to which he won a scholarship in 1959. He won an Exhibition to Merton College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. He was also secretary of the University's Dramatic Society, OUDS.
He joined the BBC in 1967 on a trainee placement at BBC Birmingham, rising to become a presenter of the regional news programmes on television and radio. Early in 1968, Jessel moved to London to join the national radio news programme The World at One as one of the so-called "golden generation" of young British journalists, which included Roger Cook and Jonathan Dimbleby. [2] Jessel's big break came with his reporting of the 1968 Paris riots. These reports pioneered the technique of actuality recordings for radio news, with Jessel recording his reports from the centre of the action. This new approach contrasted strongly with the dispassionate, detached style of reporting that predominated at the time. [3]
Jessel resigned from The World at One in 1972 to join BBC 1's nightly TV current affairs programme, 24 Hours . On this and its successor programmes, he reported on stories from around the world including successive United States presidential elections in the 1970s, exposing atrocities in Honduras and Nicaragua in the 1980s [4] and natural disasters such as the Friuli earthquake in Italy. In 1973, he and his BBC film crew were able to film one of the first areas openly controlled by Vietnamese communist forces following the 1973 truce with the United States. [5]
In October 1973, Jessel temporarily left the BBC to join commercial radio, becoming the opening presenter on LBC (London Broadcasting Company), Britain's first all-news radio station. [6]
On rejoining the BBC, Jessel moved to documentary-making, with a particular emphasis on miscarriages of justice. From 1985 he led the team at Rough Justice , [7] the BBC's long-running investigative TV series which re-examined the cases of a dozen people convicted of serious crimes, usually murder, and led to the eventual quashing of most of the convictions. Among his successful cases were the brothers Paul and Wayne Darvell, who typified the unglamorous and forgotten cases that Jessel and his team championed.
In 1990, the Rough Justice team decamped to Channel 4 and set up a production company, Just Television, dedicated exclusively to the investigation and publicising of miscarriages of justice. Jessel had been angered by the BBC's threats to drop the programme due to financial constraints and said: "I couldn't stand being cut back when programmes glorifying the police were expanding like a giant fungus." [8] The chairman of Just Television's advisory board was Jessel's friend and mentor Ludovic Kennedy, an investigator of wrongful convictions. The new programme, Trial and Error, continued to expose wrongful convictions, including the cases of Peter Fell, [9] Mary Druhan [10] Sheila Bowler [11] and Danny McNamee – all of which led to the convictions being quashed by the Court of Appeal.
From 2000 to 2010, Jessel was a commissioner of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, an independent public body set up to investigate possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Commission assesses whether convictions or sentences should be referred to a court of appeal. Jessel had been a prominent supporter and advocate of such an independent public body for many years prior to its creation. [12]
On his retirement as senior commissioner, The Times described Jessel as "a tireless champion of the wrongfully convicted". [13]
Since 2004, Jessel has been a regular anchor on BBC World News, as well as a guest presenter on the channel's flagship interview programme HARDtalk . [14]
He has served on the Advertising Standards Authority's advisory council, and is a member of the Code Compliance Tribunal of PhonePay+ regulating telephone premium-rate services. [15]
He currently sits on the Complaints Board of the independent press regulator IPSO. [16]
Jessel is married and lives in Oxfordshire. He has a son and daughter, and two children from his first marriage.[ citation needed ]
In 1989, Jessel co-authored the international bestseller Brain Sex with scientist Anne Moir, the first scientific analysis of the differences between the male and female mind. In 1995, the same partnership produced A Mind to Crime, which looked at the biological influences on criminality. Jessel also wrote Trial and Error, a book to accompany the Channel 4 television series.
The Birmingham Six were six Irishmen who were each sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 following their false convictions for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. Their convictions were declared unsafe and unsatisfactory and quashed by the Court of Appeal on 14 March 1991. The six men were later awarded financial compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million.
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven were the collective names of two groups of people, mostly Northern Irish, who were wrongly convicted in English courts in 1975 and 1976 for the Guildford pub bombings of 5 October 1974, and the Woolwich pub bombing of 7 November 1974. All the convictions were eventually quashed after long campaigns for justice, and the cases, along with those of the Birmingham Six, shattered public confidence in the integrity of the English criminal justice system.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when an unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
Barry Michael George is an English man who was found guilty of the murder of English television presenter Jill Dando and whose conviction was overturned on appeal.
The M62 coach bombing, sometimes referred to as the M62 Massacre, occurred on 4 February 1974 on the M62 motorway in northern England, when a 25-pound (11 kg) Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb hidden inside the luggage locker of a coach carrying off-duty British Armed Forces personnel and their family members exploded, killing twelve people and injuring thirty-eight others aboard the vehicle.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi was a Libyan who was head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli, Libya, and an alleged Libyan intelligence officer. On 31 January 2001, Megrahi was convicted, by a panel of three Scottish judges sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, of 270 counts of murder for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on 21 December 1988 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. His co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was found not guilty and was acquitted.
Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy was a Scottish journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author. As well as his wartime service in the Royal Navy, he is known for presenting many current affairs programmes and for reexamining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley. He also campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom.
Robert Woffinden was a British investigative journalist. Formerly a reporter with the New Musical Express, he later specialised in investigating miscarriages of justice. He wrote about a number of high-profile cases in the UK, including James Hanratty, Sion Jenkins, Jeremy Bamber, Charles Ingram, Jonathan King, and Barry George.
Hans Köchler's Lockerbie trial observer mission stemmed from the dispute between the United Kingdom, the United States, and Libya concerning arrangements for the trial of two Libyans accused of causing the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.
Roméo Phillion was convicted of the 1967 murder of Ottawa firefighter Léopold Roy, after making a confession to police which he recanted two hours later.
Rough Justice is a British television programme that was broadcast on BBC, and which investigated alleged miscarriages of justice. It was broadcast between 1982 and 2007 and played a role in overturning the convictions of 18 people involved in 13 separate cases where miscarriages of justice had occurred. The programme was similar in aim and approach to The Court of Last Resort, the NBC programme that aired in the United States from 1957–58. It is credited with contributing to the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 1997.
The innocent prisoner's dilemma, or parole deal, is a detrimental effect of a legal system in which admission of guilt can result in reduced sentences or early parole. When an innocent person is wrongly convicted of a crime, legal systems which need the individual to admit guilt — as, for example, a prerequisite step leading to parole — punish an innocent person for their integrity, and reward a person lacking in integrity. There have been cases where innocent prisoners were given the choice between freedom, in exchange for claiming guilt, and remaining imprisoned and telling the truth. Individuals have died in prison rather than admit to crimes that they did not commit.
Operation Yewtree was a British police investigation into sexual abuse allegations, predominantly the abuse of children, against the English media personality Jimmy Savile and others. The investigation, led by the Metropolitan Police Service (Met), started in October 2012. After a period of assessment, it became a full criminal investigation, involving inquiries into living people, notably other celebrities, as well as Savile, who had died the previous year.
The British Post Office scandal is a miscarriage of justice which, between 1999 and 2015, saw over 900 subpostmasters prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud when shortfalls at their branches were in fact due to errors of the Post Office's Horizon accounting software. It was described by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as "one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation's history." In 2019, the High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty and in 2020 the government established a public inquiry. Courts began to quash convictions from 2020. As of January 2024, some victims are still fighting to have their convictions overturned and receive compensation, the public inquiry is ongoing, and the Metropolitan Police is investigating the Post Office for potential fraud offences.
Raphael Rowe is a British broadcast journalist and presenter, who was wrongfully convicted in 1990 for a 1988 murder and series of aggravated robberies as part of the M25 Three. After nearly twelve years incarcerated, his convictions, along with those of his two co-defendants Michael J. George Davis and Randolph Egbert Johnson, were ruled unsafe in July 2000 and they were released.
Anthony Joseph Dolff, was farmer in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada, who was killed in 1993. He was stabbed 17 times, hit on the head with a television, and strangled with a telephone cord. Three Saulteaux people, members of the Keeseekoose First Nation, were convicted of the crime. One, Jason Keshane, 14 years old at the time of the crime, confessed to the killing and as a juvenile was sentenced to two years in prison for second degree murder. His cousins, sisters Nerissa and Odelia Quewezance, 19 and 21 at the time, were sentenced to life in prison. Neither confessed and both have maintained their innocence at all times. Dolff had been a maintenance man at the residential school the two sisters attended. That night they reportedly drank a great deal of liquor and took prescription sleeping pills at Dolff's house, where he pestered them for sex. When he discovered that Odelia had taken money from his bedroom, a violent confrontation took place, in the course of which he was killed.
Simon Hall was a British murderer who was the subject of a lengthy campaign by miscarriage of justice activists to overturn his conviction, only for him to go on to confess to the murder he was convicted of. Hall stabbed 79-year-old pensioner Joan Albert to death in her home in Capel St Mary, Suffolk in 2001, and was convicted of her murder two years later. Subsequently, the high-profile miscarriage of justice programme Rough Justice took up his case and aired a programme campaigning for him. Several MPs, Bristol University's 'Innocence Project' campaign group, his mother and his girlfriend Stephanie Hall were also involved in campaigning for him, and the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred his case to the Court of Appeal in 2009. However, the appeal court dismissed the appeal and he subsequently confessed his crime to prison authorities in 2013, before committing suicide in prison in 2014. His case was said to have gravely undermined the claims of many prisoners who claim their innocence and embarrassed miscarriage of justice activists, having proved that they had campaigned for a guilty man.
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