Matt Foot is co-director of the legal charity Appeal.
Mr Bates v. The Post Office has brought into public consciousness the devastating impact of wrongful convictions, and the endless delays and obstacles to exoneration and compensation. I have spent 25 years working as a criminal defence lawyer and have yet to find anyone who knows of a single police officer being convicted for their role in a wrongful conviction.
Following the release of the...
In 2015 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, announced that there would be an inquiry into undercover policing and the operation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). This secret unit, whose purpose was to infiltrate subversive groups, was set up in 1968 as part of Special Branch in response to protests against the Vietnam War. Only a handful of...
The home secretary, Priti Patel, spoke this week at the annual conference of the Police Federation of England and Wales in Manchester. ‘Nobody does a harder job or a better one than the police,’ she said. ‘And no one does more, in my view, to make our country great. And nobody gives greater public service.’ The opening section of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which received royal assent last month, enshrines a new ‘police covenant’. Introducing the idea in February 2020, Patel said: ‘Too many officers are paying the price for their astonishing devotion to public duty … This covenant is a pledge to do more to recognise the service and sacrifice of our police and to deliver the urgent practical support they need.’
In April 2014 I was asked to represent a man called Gurpal Virdi. The last time I had heard that name was ten years earlier at a memorial service for my father, Paul Foot, at the Hackney Empire. There, Virdi had immediately stood out, as a serving police officer addressing a largely Marxist audience. In 1998 he had been suspended from the Metropolitan Police for ‘sending racist hate...
In 1929 my great-grandfather Isaac Foot introduced one of the first legal aid acts in Parliament, the Poor Prisoners Defence Act. He was a solicitor in Plymouth as well as the Liberal MP for Bodmin, and one of his clients, a poor girl, was facing a murder charge with no financial support in the magistrates court. ‘A prisoner who is without means,’ he said, ‘ought to be in no worse position to establish his innocence than a prisoner who is able to pay.’
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