John Baker’s Blog

Early in 2005, a man in Northern China confessed to a murder that had taken place ten years previously. Reports say that he gave a detailed description of the scene where he claimed to have raped and then killed a young woman. On the strength of the confession, the judicial authorities accepted the man’s guilt.The problem was, they had already executed another man for the murder. Nie Shubin, a young farmer, had been found guilty of the rape and murder in 1995 after reportedly being tortured in police custody. His family are now seeking official compensation. But of course, nothing will bring Nie back.
In a separate case, Tang Xingshan was found guilty of murdering his wife in 1987. He insisted he was innocent and claimed that he had only confessed because he was severely beaten during the interrogations. His pleas were ignored and he was executed in 1989.In June 2006, Teng’s wife - the alleged murder victim - reappeared. Alive and unharmed. The murder for which Teng had been executed had never taken place.

The above is quoted from the literature of Amnesty International. China is preparing for the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. The Chinese authorities are particularly sensitive right now about how they are regarded by the international community. I support Amnesty’s campaign to reform and ultimately abolish China’s use of the death penalty.

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Metropolitan police have submitted a file to the Crown Prosecution Service after a fifth investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a London private investigator axed to death in 1987. The inquiry has been led by Det Ch Supt David Cook.

The Morgan family have always believed that Daniel was murdered because he was about to expose police corruption and have fought a long and often bitter battle to bring his killers to justice.

An inquest in 1988 heard allegations that Daniel Morgan’s partner, Jonathan Rees, had planned the murder with the assistance of officers from Catford police station and that Daniel’s place in his company would be taken over after the murder by a member of the murder squad, Detective Sergeant Sidney Fillery. Fillery later took early retirement and took over Daniel Morgan’s place in the company.

The file presented to the CPS amounts to around 300 pages and represents the product of five investigations, some of them highly contentious. Daniel Morgan’s murder is one of the most-investigated murders in British policing history.

“It has been a long and sometimes hellish struggle for us to get to this point” said Daniel’s brother Alastair today. “We will now have to wait several months for the Crown Prosecution to decide whether, and against whom, charges will be brought. We want the whole truth to come out so that we can move on with our lives”.

The family have been told that the submission of the file to the CPS will not be the end of the investigation and that offices will continue to seek evidence to support the prosecution of all those involved in the murder.

“In the past, the Met’s treatment of my family has been shabby and downright provocative. In 1998-99, an inquiry was carried out behind our backs after we’d been campaigning for over a decade. The Met then forced us into a high court battle to obtain disclosure in 2003 of a report by Hampshire police on the murder”.

“Throughout our twenty-year battle, the Home Office has been an utter waste of space. We tried everything in our power to warn them about serious police corruption and were ignored year after year. It took seventeen and a half years before we were granted a meeting with a minister, Hazel Blears. We found them uniformly remote, gullible and ill-informed. I do not believe anyone in that department has ever read a report on Daniel’s murder”.

Since the intervention of the Metropolitan Police Authority in 2005, the family say that the climate has changed radically and that they finally have confidence in the integrity of the current investigation. “Until this point every single institution designed to protect against police malpractice has failed us.”

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