Finally and Fully Vindicated

By AM Sunday, June 22, 2014

Share Tweet Share Share Email

I remember the name Frank Newell, a Shankill Road man, from four decades ago. It stood out because at one point he embarked on a hunger strike to proclaim his innocence, after being tried and convicted in the North’s less than just courts. His protest more associated with republicans than anyone else, made the headlines although to little avail.

Newell had been sentenced to four years for an armed robbery he did not commit and on appeal the judiciary thinking it was on Hughie Green's Double Your Money TV show  increased the term to eight years. He ended up serving four. Even back then the judicial treatment of Frank Newell seemed cruel and unusual punishment. But few cared enough to kick up. Newell was forced to experience the judicious insight of Lily Tomlin ‘we're all in this alone’.

The robbery had taken place in Lisburn, the work of the UVF, a loyalist combatant group. Another combatant group, the RUC, charged Frank Newell who always insisted his car had been hijacked by the robbers, a standard modus operandi within Belfast combatant circles at the time. He was too fearful to name the hijackers, again pretty much a feature of the times.

Newell never gave up. Backed by Committee on the Administration of Justice, he pressed to have his case reopened and the Criminal Cases Review Commission responded by referring the case back for appeal. This resulted in Newell, currently 73, being cleared at the Appeal Court in Belfast and he now stands fully and finally vindicated.

He won his case because in the intervening years much has come to light that back in the day was enveloped in state darkness. An understanding between the RUC and the prosecution, much as it was in the Pat Livingstone case, led to the deliberate withholding of evidence, a trait very much alive today and which has given rise to the ombudsman initiating a Judicial Review to force the PSNI to desist from covering up and withholding information.

In the case of Frank Newell the failure to disclose pertained to three areas:

• Details of an alibi statement from colleagues placing Mr Newell at his taxi depot on the day of the robbery.
• Discrepancies in witness identification statements.
• Police intelligence pointing to both his innocence and to the real culprits having Ulster Volunteer Force connections.

It was revealed in court by Newell's barrister that high ranking RUC members believed him to be innocent. If they grappled with their conscience they won. Ultimately, they didn’t care. They allowed him to languish in prison, remained indifferent to whether he lived or died as a result of his hunger strike, and endorsed the besmirching of his reputation. All of this more than likely happened to facilitate Special Branch to continue drawing on the agents they were running within the UVF.

Frank Newell should never have been in the dock. The people who that dubious honour belonged to will never reach it even if they are still alive. Law enforcement’s punitive approach to the past does not extend as far as law enforcement operatives; the torturers, colluders, police shoot to kill deaths squads, plastic bullet killers, perjurers et al, all people guilty of heinous acts but who will never spend a day behind bars. Yet innocent Frank Newell did four years. The judiciary which inexplicably has escaped being investigated for its nocuous role during the northern conflict in the Newell case willingly functioned as a clearing house for disposing of people the police hauled in front of it.

Casting an eye over the North’s past sees the same point being reinforced time after time. Law enforcement was never merely about enforcing the law which it broke often enough but about order enforcement; the order of the state whether it was in breach of the law or not. And the dark shadow cast by that particular elephant in the room continues to leave much that is opaque in today's world of supposed openness and transparency. To this very day collusion sits at the centre of the criminal justice system: the PSNI present and the RUC past, joined at the hip where the former covers for the latter.

Fair deuce, Frank Newell.