Justice for Siôn Jenkins

The perspective of time.

Past and present link in unexpected ways. The Leveson inquiry’s current focus on the media, the police and the truth shines a light in unexpected corners.

In December 2010, when the murder of Joanna Yeates was first being investigated, the Attorney General felt it necessary to remind the media “that the contempt of court rules are there to protect the rule of law and the fair trial process.”

In 1997, following the murder of Billie-Jo Jenkins in Hastings, East Sussex no such scruples were evident. A review of the media archive at that time reveals an unfettered attack on the man accused of that crime and then—wrongly—convicted. It took nine years for that wrong to be righted.

Yet as the fifteenth anniversary of the murder approaches, Billie-Jo’s killer has not been found.

On the tenth anniversary of her death, just one year after Siôn Jenkins was acquitted of all charges, a Sussex police spokesman asserted : “We will continue actively to pursue any viable lines of inquiry.”

Following a high-profile legal process costing an unprecedented amount of public money, Sussex police have in fact relied on the passing of time, public forgetfulness and the bland ambiguity of that statement to ensure that their inertia over the Jenkins case remains unchallenged. After all there is now a new order ; those officers involved in the case have retired or moved on.

As 2012 begins, though, the byzantine interactions over many years between the media and police are under close scrutiny, leading back to past events and reopening doors perhaps thought to have been permanently closed.

A tangled web

During the course of last year, as revelations about phone hacking emerged, it became apparent that a variety of investigations would be necessary to establish the full extent and nature of what had taken place.

• Operation Weeting was launched to investigate phone hacking by the News of the World.
• Operation Elveden was launched to investigate inappropriate payments to police by those involved in phone hacking.
• Operation Tuleta was launched to investigate computer hacking in order to obtain private information.
• The Leveson inquiry was commissioned to inquire into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press and to examine the extent of unlawful or improper conduct within News International and other newspaper organisations.

It has become clear that many individuals, in the public eye for a variety of very different reasons, have been deeply damaged by media intrusion over the years. As a result of that intrusion both truth and justice have been subverted.

Ever since its creation more than twelve years ago, this website has regularly raised the issue of media influence and its negative impact on the delivery of justice, particularly in high profile cases like that of Siôn Jenkins. The relationship between Sussex police and parts of the media had far-reaching consequences in the late 1990s and into the early years of the twenty first century.

Echoes from the past

The News of the World played a uniquely destructive part in August 1998, with a story about Siôn Jenkins written by Ian Edmondson.

Edmondson, at that time the News of the World’s crime correspondent, subsequently became an associate editor at the newspaper, was suspended and dismissed in January 2011, arrested in April 2011 as part of Operation Weeting, and is currently on bail till March 2012.

Ian Edmondson’s story in the News of The World (9 August 1998) was a salacious and totally untrue alleged ‘confession’ of guilt, its timing designed to reinforce a spectacularly weak conviction at a very sensitive time for Sussex police.

The influence of the News of the World in those years meant that Edmondson’s story helped to reinforce the likelihood that Siôn Jenkins’ first appeal in 1999 would fail. Senior police officers involved in the Jenkins investigation gave credibility to the story by commenting publicly in a second, local, newspaper.

Responsibility for the ensuing years of costly litigation may be laid at the door of those eager to provide a quick result in order to satisfy a public appetite for vengeance sharpened by sensational media coverage.

Criminal justice and the media.

In early June 2001 there was a conference at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park. Its title was ‘Criminal Justice and the Media: an Uneasy Marriage?’ and its speakers included such well known names as Blake Morrison and Roger Graef.

One of the topics was ’ The Media as a Tool’. The speaker was Detective Superintendent Jeremy Paine. He had become nationally known three years previously as the detective who led the investigation into the Jenkins murder, and by the time of the conference was also a Crimewatch presenter on BBC television.

The conference paper reveals that "Jeremy … had been a Detective Superintendent for only ten days when the Billy Jo (sic) Jenkins case gave him his ‘baptism of fire’. "

In the light of current investigations and that Edmondson story of 1998 the comments of a decade ago provide topical reading

The rigorous pursuit of error.

As a society we are finally learning that it is less damaging to admit mistakes than to pretend that they never happened. Nothing enhances justice more than the rigorous pursuit of error.

The Guardian: Justice on Trial