Lawyers for three black men convicted as teenagers of a 2016 murder in Manchester, England, would apply for their convictions to be formally reviewed, saying that they resulted from institutional racism by the police, prosecution and judge.
The mothers of the three men — Durrell Goodall, Reano Walters and Nathaniel “Jay” Williams — would travel to Birmingham, England, to personally deliver their sons’ 180-page application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
Goodall, Walters and Williams were prosecuted with nine other boys and young men after the murder of Abdul Hafidah, 18, in the inner city area of Moss Side, Manchester. Only one teenager, Devonte Cantrill, 19, committed the fatal stabbing of Hafidah, but all defendants were accused of being in a violent gang called Active Only (AO).
Seven were convicted of murder and four of manslaughter, under the controversial “joint enterprise” law, and sentenced by judge Peter Openshaw to a collective minimum in prison of 168 years.
The application to the commission, prepared by solicitors Keir Monteith and Darrell Ennis-Gayle from Hodge Jones & Allen after two years compiling new evidence, says “there was no violent criminal gang by the name of AO,” and that the convictions are a “gross miscarriage of justice.”
The convictions represented a “collective organization failure” throughout the investigation, prosecution and trial process, Monteith said.
“And at the core of that collective failure is institutional racism,” he said.
British Shadow Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Lucy Powell, who is Labour Party member of parliament for Manchester Central, which includes Moss Side, supports the application and has said the “gang narrative” is “racially discriminatory.”
Joint enterprise is a legal mechanism particularly applied by the British Crown Prosecution Service to violence by alleged gangs. It holds all participants in a violent incident, however minor their individual actions, equally guilty if they are found to have intentionally “encouraged and assisted” a person to commit the most serious violence.
A series of reviews and academic research has found that black boys and young men are disproportionately portrayed as being in gangs, and there is racial discrimination in the legal system.
In the Moss Side prosecution, Greater Manchester Police officer Bryan Deighton gave evidence that the defendants were in the AO gang, with references to the notorious Los Angeles Bloods and Crips gangs, and criminal gangs in Manchester more than two decades earlier.
A rap video, produced and uploaded to YouTube and social media in 2015, in which some of the defendants participated, was portrayed, and referred to by Openshaw, as a “gang video.”
At sentencing, Openshaw said he found “as a fact that each convicted defendant was a member of the AO gang, or at least was affiliated to it,” principally due to some having “AO signs or symbols on their mobile telephones.”
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