BRITISH TV’S ‘ROUGH JUSTICE’ HELPS FREE LEGAL VICTIMS

It grew out of a minor tiff with a London traffic cop.

Peter Hill, a reporter-producer with the British Broadcasting Corp., had driven past what he insists was a green traffic light, but a police officer said it was red.

Hill was given a ticket and found guilty in court, even though he established that the arresting officer could not have seen the light from where he was parked.

“It was a small thing, but it shook me,” Hill recalled. “I was innocent. I had prepared my case well, but I still lost. I thought, if this happened on something small, maybe it happened on a large scale, too.”

He decided to find out, and his labors resulted in an acclaimed but unsettling BBC television series “Rough Justice.” It shows that frightening, sometimes appalling miscarriages of justice occur in Britain, and on a scale far beyond what anyone has imagined.

The program has aroused broad public interest and challenged the cherished conviction of most lawyers here that British justice is the world’s best. It has triggered a parliamentary investigation of court procedures and brought pressure for sweeping reform in key areas of Britain’s venerable judicial process.

“It has shaken a complacency which for years has stifled efforts to implement changes in the system,” said Peter Ashman, legal officer for Justice, a society for judicial reform and legal assistance.

“People realize now that things can go wrong.”

Since it went on the air in March of 1982, “Rough Justice” has investigated cases involving 10 convicts, eight of them serving life terms for murder. On the basis of its disclosures, one of the murder convictions has been overturned, two convicted murderers have been released on parole and four others are in the process of appeal.

The program’s record is especially impressive because reinvestigations are more unusual and the appeals procedures more restrictive in Britain than in the United States.

In one of the most dramatic, clear-cut cases, the “Rough Justice” team traced a woman to Southern California, where she admitted on camera last summer that she had made up a story about her apartment in Manchester being burglarized. As a consequence, Anthony Mycock, a man with three children and no previous criminal record, has served two years of a five-year sentence for burglary.

Earlier this month, a British judge rejected an appeal for bail on behalf of the 31-year-old Mycock. However, the judge ordered that an appeal lodged by Mycock be heard before Christmas. The 31-year-old woman who “identified” Mycock as the person who tied her up and robbed her confessed to a BBC television team last summer in Southern California that the crime never took place. “It was a figment of my imagination,” she said.

In the backlash created by the first series of “Rough Justice” programs, the Court of Appeal promised to relax the stringent rules that govern the admissibility of new evidence, while those responsible for reopening criminal investigations promised to ease their criteria rules for recommending judicial appeal. So far, though, little has changed, according to British legal rights activists.

Hill’s goal is to pressure the government into setting up an independent body for the review of questionable cases. He and many legal reformists maintain that the current system, where reinvestigation is often conducted by the same policemen who conducted the original investigation, is bound to be prejudiced.

“What we are doing shouldn’t be a job for television,” Hill said. “It’s a job for an official government review board.”

The “Rough Justice” program is not the first attempt by television to expose flaws in the judicial process. A Swedish program, “Rekord Magazine,” has investigated miscarriages of justice in Sweden but has concentrated on less serious crime. And in Britain individual cases of injustice have been exposed.

But “Rough Justice” is a continuing series exposing errors in cases involving serious crime, and this is the secret of its impact.

“Previous television exposes were viewed as aberrations where something went wrong on a specific case,” Ashman said. “The implication of ‘Rough Justice’ is that the system itself is faulty.”

The cases taken up by Hill’s team have come from the files of Justice, which for nearly three decades has struggled quietly and with modest resources to correct individual cases of injustice.

Initially, Hill planned to buy the copyright to specific Justice cases, then finance the reinvestigation, on camera, by a Justice team. The idea was based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s Court of Last Resort, a group of eminent American criminal investigators and lawyers who gathered evidence to overturn death sentences in the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s. Gardner’s court was funded at first by Argosy magazine, then by Gardner himself, using proceeds from his Perry Mason stories, but it lapsed with his death in 1968.

The idea of subsidizing such a court here was dropped because of the expense involved. The BBC had allocated only the equivalent of about $40,000 for each case, including filming. As an alternative, Hill picked three cases and began investigating on his own to test his original theory.

The first half-hour program dealt with a 38-year-old drifter named Jock Russell who had been sentenced to life in prison for the 1976 stabbing of a young woman in her South London apartment--despite a mountain of evidence indicating that he could not have done it.

In the second case, aired a week later, “Rough Justice” established the innocence of two Irish brawlers serving life for killing a man in a fight in Manchester. It named the actual killer and showed two persons saying that he had confessed to them.

By the end of the first three-program series--the final show dealt with a burly six-footer who had been convicted of sexual assault even though the victim and three witnesses had described the assailant as slim and short--”Rough Justice” had drawn national attention, scored impressive ratings for a current affairs program and sent its first ripples through the legal community.

In subsequent programs, Hill has moved in the direction of Gardner’s Court of Last Resort by involving eminent legal figures in his investigations, both on and off camera. Preliminary work has begun on a further series, with the first case focusing on a Glasgow man serving life for the murder of a local woman taxi driver and the sexual assault and killing of another woman.

Before getting deeply involved in a case, Hill studies it carefully. If he finds it promising, he “tastes” it through a few days of active investigation. If this turns up nothing of promise, the case is usually dropped.

Once started, though, reinvestigation can take years--and it has. Hill prefers to do a series of investigations in tandem, so that if one gets stalled he can switch to another.

The cases of Margaret Livesey, serving life for the murder of her 14-year-old son, and Alf Fox, convicted of killing his wife and mother-in-law four years ago, both required two years to bring to the air. By contrast, the case against Anthony Mycock, sentenced to five years for assaulting a woman and burglarizing her apartment, required only two weeks to discredit.

Only once has the team been forced to abandon a case after getting well into it because they no longer believed in the convict’s innocence.

Despite the program’s lofty aim, the investigations invariably meet with stiff resistance. Some people regard the television effort with suspicion, and, for relatives of the victims, it can mean reopening deep and painful emotional wounds.

When the police in Manchester learned that “Rough Justice” was reinvestigating a murder case, Hill said, they took up a counterinvestigation of the BBC team. And Justice, the legal reform society, accused the police of threatening a woman who was prepared to go back into court to repeat remarks already made before the cameras that would have implicated another man.

Several branches of the government have declined to help. The Ministry of Defense, for example, refused to let a paratrooper repeat for the cameras expert-witness testimony given in court that someone jumping from a third-story window would almost certainly have leg or ankle injuries. Producers eventually found a retired officer to say the same thing.

When the “Rough Justice” team met with stares and icy silence in a northern England neighborhood still feeling the impact of a boy’s murder years before, it spent six months gradually breaking down the barriers, then moved in with its cameras. A reporter quickly got the first interview and others followed, yielding new evidence that could justify appealing a life sentence.

“There is no real secret to our success,” Hill said. “It is just a lot of persistence and hard work.”

In recent cases the team has carried out on-camera research, which has brought additional drama to the program. In a murder case in which a man was convicted largely because he had a distinctive key ring from the victim’s purse, the team filmed the victim’s friends and family all picking a significantly different-looking key ring from a selection.

Audience analysis has shown that the program is watched by a high number of people involved in law enforcement as well as people who have run afoul of the law.

And some viewers appear to have misinterpreted the nature of its success. Hill recalled that after lecturing at a prison, he was approached by an inmate seeking help. When Hill asked the convict if he were innocent, the man replied:

“Of course I’m not, but does that matter?”