George Davis (robber)

Last updated

George Davis
Born1941 (age 80–81)
Bletchley, England
OccupationStoppo (getaway) driver
Spouse(s)Rose (div. 1976)
Jennifer
Children2
Conviction(s) Armed robbery (three times)
Criminal penalty20 years (released under Prerogative of Mercy)
15 years
18 months

George Davis (born 1941)[ citation needed ] is an armed robber, born in Bletchley,[ citation needed ] England and active in England. He became known through a successful campaign by friends and supporters to free him from prison after his wrongful conviction in March 1975, for an armed payroll robbery at the London Electricity Board (LEB) offices in Ilford, Greater London, on 4 April 1974. [1] The conviction was based solely on unreliable use of identification evidence, in the absence of other evidence connecting him with the crime. Following his release, Davis was jailed for two cases of armed robbery.

Contents

Evidence

A number of blood samples (matching different blood groups) were recovered and formed part of the prosecution case. Of four accused, only Davis was convicted. At a number of specific locations, Davis was identified but the blood obtained from the location did not match his; neither did the blood match any of his co-accused.[ citation needed ]

A further complication turned on the fact that Davis might never have been committed for trial from the lower courts had blood test results been disclosed at the committal stage. Although it subsequently became clear that evidence had by then become available to police, it was suppressed and this abuse of due process became one of the core allegations relied upon by those campaigning for the release of Davis.

"The blood samples taken from ... Davis ... at Walthamstow on 18 May 1974 were passed on to the Yard's Senior Scientific Officer, Peter Martin, on 21 May and he reported his negative findings to the police officer in charge of the case on 20 June. At as late as November 1974 on a third bail application, this time before a judge in chambers, and after committals had been completed (28 October) the police were saying that they still awaited the blood results from forensic." [2]

Campaign for release

Public activism

On 19 August 1975, while Davis was serving a 20-year prison sentence for the Ilford LEB robbery, his supporters dug holes in the pitch and poured oil over one end of the wicket at the Headingley Cricket Ground, preventing further play in the Test match between England and Australia. [3] This direct action protest by relatives and friends of George Davis was accompanied by Davis Campaign graffiti proclaiming "FREE GEORGE DAVIS ... JUSTICE FOR GEORGE DAVIS ... GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT ... SORRY IT HAD TO [BE] DONE". Three men and one woman were tried for this incident, and one, Peter Chappell, was eventually jailed for 18 months.[ citation needed ] The Davis campaigners who were remanded to prison to await trial for the Headingley sabotage continued their campaigning in support of one another within the prison system.[ citation needed ] One, Geraldine Hughes, refused to accept bail until it had also been granted to all of her co-accused.[ citation needed ] The campaign was also characterised by the graffiti “GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT OK” or some variant thereof, in plain white paint, appearing on dozens of walls and bridges in London and on motorways. [4]

Celebrity support

Roger Daltrey of The Who went on stage in 1975 wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "George Davis Is Innocent". "George Davis Is Innocent" was a song on Sham 69's 1978 debut album Tell Us the Truth , and the song "The Cockney Kids Are Innocent" ends with a namecheck. Patrik Fitzgerald also showed support with "George" on the 1979 EP The Paranoid Ward. Davis received a namecheck in the Duran Duran song "Friends of Mine" on the album Duran Duran (1981): the chorus begins "Georgie Davis is coming out".

The back cover of the Tom Robinson Band's LP Power in the Darkness (1978) contains a cropped photo of the band seated on a street in front of a wall; the 2004 CD issue of that album shows the uncropped photo, showing the wall contained the graffito "GEORGE DAVIS IS GUILTY". [5]

Media sympathy

Before Chappell's 1976 trial and conviction there was media criticism of the decision by the courts to refuse bail to the Headingley defendants (for example The Daily Telegraph editorial "WHEN TO GIVE BAIL", 28 August 1975) and eventually bail was granted to all of them. Bail conditions were stringent and denied the four Headingley accused the right to discuss Davis's wrongful conviction in public.

Importantly, the original campaign to free Davis overlapped with, variously influenced, and was in turn influenced by other criminal justice campaigns in London, particularly the Free George Ince Campaign. Ince, another London victim of identification evidence, was also eventually freed. Although the "EAST END SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN...TO STOP EAST END FIT UPS" (October 1975, UPAL/INCE Campaign political poster) had pre-dated the Davis Campaign, it went on to parallel it.

Both campaigns had support from London political activists who had a history of organising radical defence campaigns around the criminal justice system. In particular, among these core activists (who had supported and helped organise "defence campaigns" in connection with The Angry Brigade arrests and criminal prosecutions) were a number who went on to establish Up Against The Law (UPAL), a London-based "political collective". This Collective publicised the Ince case [6] and went on to produce the most detailed publicly available investigation of the 1974 Davis Case armed robbery. [7]

In September 1975, Peter Chappell while awaiting trial in prison for the August 1975 Headingley sabotage, wrote to UPAL:

"When this campaign started 18 months ago I was completely on my own and, if the truth were known, I was probably being labelled as a well meaning nut case, even in East London with no friends at all that I could seriously talk to about Davis’s case… I value UPAL’S help a great deal … I thought that I must find other people and that if I make sacrifices then sooner or later others would join the fight…. George Davis is not on his own any more thanks to people like you. There are more things twixt life and death than a pound note."

Some of UPAL's core activists, involved with both the Davis and Ince Campaigns, had also had late '60s early '70s activist connections with the Release Collective. [8]

Release

In May 1976, despite a then-recent Court of Appeal decision (11 December 1975) not to overturn Davis's criminal conviction, the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, on partial completion of a police review of the case, agreed to recommend the release of Davis without further referral back to the Court of Appeal. Jenkins undertook this highly exceptional exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy because of doubts over the evidence presented by the police which helped convict Davis. Davis's release was announced on 11 May 1976.

At the time of Davis's release, former Home Office Minister Alex Lyon wrote at some length to explain the genuine difficulties he had faced in seeking to resolve the constitutional difficulties he saw as preventing Davis's release from a conviction that he had regarded as unsafe. [9]

According to a BBC Radio 4 documentary, [10] although Davis was released because his conviction was deemed to be "unsafe" by the Home Secretary he extraordinarily held that Davis was not held to be "innocent". The period of official embargo on the release to the Public Record Office of official papers, related to the 1976 decision to free Davis, has now been extended by 20 years until 2026.

However, according to a report in The Independent written by the newspaper's Law Editor, Robert Verkaik, Davis and one of his original trial barristers, David Whitehouse, later a QC, intended to make representations to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the hope that they would return to court citing new evidence and establish Davis's innocence and seek compensation for his period of imprisonment. [11] The appeal was heard "explicitly on the basis that (Davis) has no expectation of compensation or other recognition. His reputation is, clearly, that of an armed robber whatever the result". [12]

On 24 May 2011, Davis's conviction for the 1974 raid on the London Electricity Board was quashed by three judges at the Court of Appeal. One of the judges, Lord Justice Hughes, said that the conviction, based on dubious identification evidence, was unsafe but that the court was not able positively to exonerate Davis. [13]

Further robberies

In 1978, two years after his release from prison, Davis was jailed again, having pleaded guilty to involvement in an armed bank raid on 23 September 1977 at the Bank of Cyprus, Seven Sisters Road, London. [14] Davis was caught at the wheel of the getaway van with weapons beside him; in the raid shots were fired and a security guard clubbed to the ground. [15] He was released early in 1984 but jailed again in 1987 for attempting to steal mailbags. Davis pleaded guilty. [11]

Personal life

Some time[ when? ] after his release from prison in 1976, Davis separated from his first wife Rose. Some years later[ when? ] he married Jennifer, the daughter of a North London police Chief Inspector. [16]

His first wife, Rose Dean-Davis (d. 31 January 2009), wrote a book, The Wars of Rosie: Hard Knocks, Endurance and the 'George Davis Is Innocent' Campaign in 2008. [17]

Related Research Articles

Murder of Wendy Sewell

The Stephen Downing case involved the conviction and imprisonment in 1974 of a 17-year-old council worker, Stephen Downing, for the murder of a 32-year-old legal secretary, Wendy Sewell, in the town of Bakewell in the Peak District in Derbyshire.

The Guildford Four and Maguire Seven were the collective names of two groups whose convictions in English courts in 1975 and 1976 for the Guildford pub bombings of 5 October 1974 were eventually quashed after long campaigns for justice. The Guildford Four were wrongly convicted of bombings carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA); the Maguire Seven were wrongly convicted of handling explosives found during the investigation into the bombings. Both groups' convictions were eventually declared "unsafe and unsatisfactory" and reversed in 1989 and 1991 respectively after they had served up to 15–16 years in prison. Along with the Maguires and the Guildford Four, a number of other people faced charges relating to the bombings, six of them charged with murder, but these charges were dropped. No one else was charged with the bombings, or supplying the material; three police officers were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, but found not guilty.

The West Midlands Serious Crime Squad was a police unit in the English West Midlands which operated from 1974 to 1989. It was disbanded after an investigation into allegations of incompetence and abuse of power on the part of some of the squad's members. Some of this misconduct resulted in wrongful convictions, including the high-profile case of the Birmingham Six. The sister Regional Crime Squad based at Bilston was responsible for the investigation of the Bridgewater Four.

Murder of Lesley Molseed

Lesley Molseed, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, was abducted and murdered on 5 October 1975 in West Yorkshire, England. She was on a errand to the local shop. Stefan Kiszko, an intellectually-disabled young man who lived near Molseed in Greater Manchester, was wrongly convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering her, and served 16 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. His mental and physical health had deteriorated in prison and he died 22 months after his release in February 1992 – before he could collect the money owed to him for his wrongful conviction. His ordeal was described by one British MP as "the worst miscarriage of justice of all time." Evidence that Kiszko could not have committed the crime was suppressed by three members of the investigation team, who were initially arrested in 1993 before charges were dropped. However, in 2006, a DNA match led to the arrest of Ronald Castree for Molseed's murder; he was convicted the following year and sentenced to life in prison.

The M25 Three were Raphael Rowe, Michael George Davis, and Randolph Egbert Johnson, who were jailed for life at the Old Bailey in March 1990 after being convicted for murder and burglary. The name was taken from the location of the crimes, which were committed around the M25, London's orbital motorway, during the early hours of 16 December 1988. The original trial took place between January and February 1990, resulting in all three being convicted of the murder of Peter Hurburgh, causing grievous bodily harm with intent to Timothy Napier and several robberies. Each was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder and given substantial sentences for the other offences. The convictions were overturned in July 2000. All three men have consistently maintained their innocence.

The conviction of Liverpool F.C. supporter Michael Shields resulted from the attempted murder of Bulgarian citizen Martin Georgiev on 30 May 2005 with a paving slab in the Black Sea resort of Golden Sands, Bulgaria, following Liverpool F.C.'s 2005 UEFA Champions League win. Shields was arrested and subsequently convicted for the attack. Shields launched two appeals against his conviction amid a high-profile campaign, in 2005 and 2006, but they both failed and the original verdict was affirmed. His prison term was reduced from 15 to 10 years after the second appeal – but with an increase in fine. With parole, he would have been due for release in 2010.

This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.

Derek Creighton "Bertie" Smalls was considered by many as Britain's first supergrass. Although there have been informers throughout history – the Kray twins were partly convicted two years before Smalls on evidence given by Leslie Payne – the Smalls case was significant for three reasons: the first informer to give the police volume names of his associates and provide the evidence that would send dozens of them to prison to serve long sentences; the first criminal informer to strike a written deal with the Director of Public Prosecutions; the only criminal informer to serve no time for his crime in return for providing Queen's evidence.

State of Nevada v. Orenthal James Simpson, et al. was a criminal case prosecuted in 2007–2008 in the U.S. state of Nevada, primarily involving the retired American football player O. J. Simpson.

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.

Cornelius Dupree Jr. is an American who was declared innocent of a 1980 conviction for aggravated robbery, which was alleged to have been committed during a rape in 1979. He was paroled in July 2010 after serving 30 years of a 75-year prison sentence in Texas. Prosecutors cleared him of the crime after a test of his DNA profile did not match traces of semen evidence from the case. Dupree, who was represented by the Innocence Project, spent more time in prison in Texas than any other inmate who was eventually exonerated by DNA evidence.

Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51 (2011), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court considered whether a prosecutor's office can be held liable for a single Brady violation by one of its members on the theory that the office provided inadequate training.

This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.

California Innocence Project American legal non-profit founded 1999

The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.

Ryan W. Ferguson Wrongfully convicted American (born 1984)

Ryan W. Ferguson is an American man who spent nearly 10 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the murder, Ferguson was a 17-year-old high-school student.

Kirstin Blaise Lobato is a Nevada woman who was exonerated for the July 2001 murder and mutilation of Duran Bailey, a homeless man from St. Louis who was living in Las Vegas at the time of his death. At her first trial in May 2002, she was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 40 to 100 years in prison. In a 2006 retrial, she was convicted of the lesser charges of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 13 to 45 years. Lobato's case gained significant notoriety due to the publication of new evidence, which some believe points to her innocence of the crime.

Sam Hallam, from Hoxton, London, is one of the youngest victims of a UK miscarriage of justice after an appeal court quashed his murder conviction in 2012.

Louis N. Scarcella

Louis N. Scarcella is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who initially came to prominence during the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s–1990s, earning frequent commendations before many of his investigations were overturned in the 2010s. As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases. Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct resulting in false testimony. As of November 2019, 15 people had their convictions overturned in Scarcella's homicide cases, as the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney's Office continued to review dozens of his investigations. Prosecutors and judges have explicitly cited evidence of his improper conduct, in criminal cases involving at least 8 suspects. Nevertheless, Scarcella has consistently denied wrongdoing, and the statute of limitations has protected him from possible legal consequences.

Robert Brown is a Scottish man who spent 25 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. In January 1977, Annie Walsh was beaten to death in her home in Manchester, England and Brown was first interrogated and beaten by the police officers investigating this crime. Under duress, Brown signed a confession and was found guilty at trial. He maintained his innocence throughout his prison sentence even going so far as denying himself parole by not admitting to the crime. He was released on appeal in 2002 and is thought to be one of the longest serving victims of a miscarriage of justice in the United Kingdom.

References

  1. ↑ Campbell, Duncan (24 February 2011). "George Davis in court 40 years after robbery that sent him to jail". The Guardian. Guardian Media Group . Retrieved 14 July 2019.
  2. ↑ "Fitting Up George Davis", UPAL Magazine. Issue 9. August 1975 p 12
  3. ↑ "1975: Davis campaigners stop Test match". BBC. 19 August 1975. Retrieved 21 September 2008.
  4. ↑ "2011: Graffiti campaigns that stuck in the mind". BBC. 25 May 2011. Retrieved 9 January 2022.
  5. ↑ Tom Robinson Band, "Power in the Darkness," CD issue EMI 7243 6 66764 2 9
  6. ↑ "Setting Up George – Ince by Ince", UPAL Magazine No. 7. Nov/Dec 1974
  7. ↑ "Fitting Up George Davis", UPAL Magazine. Issue 9. August 1975 pp 6>22
  8. ↑ Jackie Leishman, "Underground offers do-it-yourself law". The Guardian. 2 March 1973. p10
  9. ↑ The Guardian (12 May 1976 - "Is the system guilty"
  10. ↑ "Free George Davis" 6 December 2006
  11. 1 2 Verkaik, Robert (10 February 2007). "George Davis is still innocent, OK: after 30 years, ex-con back in court to clear name". The Independent. London. Retrieved 21 September 2008.
  12. ↑ George Davis -v- R [2011] EWCA Crim 1258
  13. ↑ Matthew Engel, 'George Davis is innocent. Sort of', the Financial Times, 25 May. 2011
  14. ↑ "Rose Davis". The Telegraph.
  15. ↑ Obituary of Rose Davis, The Daily Telegraph.
  16. ↑ Robert Verkaik (Law Editor) The Independent (10.02.2007). "G.D. is still innocent, OK: After 30 years, ex-con back in court to clear name".
  17. ↑ Pennant Books. ISBN   978-1-906015-32-9.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.