'I never saw my solicitor', Chris Danks told me in the visiting room at Lindholme prison. 'I couldn't pick him out on an identification parade, and he couldn't pick me out. My family never saw him. The person we thought was my solicitor turned out to be an unqualified clerk,' he went on to explain. 'After I was convicted, I told him I wanted to appeal. He said he would sort it out. A few weeks later, he came to see me and told me I could not appeal. Only after that we found out that he was not a solicitor at all. He was an ex-police officer.'

That was 16 years ago. Chris was convicted of murder, and so he is serving a life sentence. He has consistently claimed to be innocent. We first heard of this case from Audrey Danks, Chris's mother, who has never ceased trying to find a way to challenge Chris's conviction. She wrote because she saw an article by me published by Inside Time, a newspaper for prisoners. The article criticised defence lawyers, suggesting that, through being over confident (or possibly lazy), and failing to do their job properly, they contributed to miscarriages of justice. We seemed to have opened a can of worms - letters came flooding in, all of them unsolicited, many of them saying, 'You could have been talking about my case', and giving a mass of detail to support the authors' allegations against their lawyers. Of these, Chris Danks' case seemed to be the worst.

It was a challenge. We know we can't assume that just because defence lawyers haven't done their job properly, the defendants they were representing must be innocent. Before we take up a case, we have to be sure that the prisoner concerned really is innocent - that she or he didn't do it. Finding technical faults in the conduct of the trial, even finding something as bad as the complete neglect of the case by a defence lawyer, isn't enough. We have to know what difference any such technical fault made to the trial, and how it contributed to the conviction of someone who is innocent.

Audrey and her family came along to a meeting of Innocent, the Manchester-based group of families and friends of wrongly convicted prisoners. They passed to me their carefully preserved files of defence papers: a complete set of pre-trial depositions, including witness statements and verbatim records of police interviews of suspects. They told me as best they could which of the witnesses were actually called at the trial, and which were never heard by the jury. I read the documents carefully, and went to see Chris, in order to hear his account of what happened.

A pub brawl in Eccles

The case itself was not the sort I would usually want to deal with, since it looked as if it would be impossible to find out what happened when the crime took place. Chris was convicted of the murder of a young man, Lesley Beamer, who received a fatal stab wound during a brawl outside a pub in Eccles. Pub brawls are very confused events, and the chances of developing a clear idea of what happened during them, are low. This one was a large-scale affray, comprising several different fights in a pedestrianised shopping street and alley ways leading off it. Chris was there in the street with his brother and other friends, but neither he nor the group he was in were involved in the fight at first. Then Chris saw that a friend of his, Dave Burrows, was being attacked by a group of men. Chris drew a knife (a folding pocket knife) and stabbed at three of the people who were kicking his friend. One of these, according to the prosecution, was Lesley Beamer, who died in hospital later that night.

The first, and most important claim that Chris makes about this account is that the among the people he stabbed was not Lesley Beamer, but his identical twin brother Kevin. The stab wounds Chris inflicted were superficial, since his intention was only to protect his friend by stopping the assault. He could not have killed anyone. The other two men that he stabbed were arrested and so their injuries are known.

Chris was pulled out of the fight by his friends. His brother took the knife off him and dropped it, and they left the scene. Later the knife was found by a police officer next to a pool of spilt beer. The police arrested a large number of men who were involved in the affray and interviewed them. Chris was charged with the murder of Lesley Beamer, because he had been involved in the fight; he had used a knife, which was later found at the scene with blood on it which apparently matched that of the dead man; and because he had stabbed a man who looked exactly like the man who died as the result of a stab wound. How could he begin to prove he was innocent?

Chris's defence

In 1984, when this happened, Chris was a small-time cannabis dealer. The knife in question was the one he used to cut blocks of resin for his customers. It wasn't a weapon, and it probably wasn't the knife that caused Lesley Beamer's death. It didn't match the fatal wound described by the pathologist, Dr Geoffrey Garratt, although when Dr Garratt was shown the knife, he gave his opinion that the knife could have caused the wound.

Since then we have learnt more about Dr Garratt, who retired after the Court of Appeal accepted that his work had been poor, and the conclusions he drew from it unwarranted, in the case of Kevin Callan. Callan's conviction for murder of a child by shaking her to death was overturned when the Court accepted that, despite Garratt's assertion that this is what had happened, the child could not have been shaken to death - that in his evidence Garratt had described something that was not physically possible.

Unfortunately less was known about Dr Garratt when Chris was convicted. In any case, neither he nor the defence pathologist were called to give evidence at Chris's trial, so all the jury heard of the matter was Garratt's opinion given in his witness statement (which was read to the court), and not what he might have said if properly cross examined.

The evidence of the blood on the knife was also dubious. Chris's brother said that he wiped the knife before discarding it, and when it was found it was wet with beer. Yet apparently it still had traces of blood on it. The test by which the blood was matched to that of Lesley Beamer was imprecise and used a technique since abandoned (this took place long before more precise matching was made possible by DNA analysis). But even if the blood did match that of Lesley Beamer, it would also match that of Kevin Beamer, his identical twin. The blood appeared to prove very
little.

Other knives were found at the scene, and other people involved in the fight were seen to wield knives. So Chris was only one of a number of possible suspects. Kevin Beamer, who was also arrested and interviewed, and who also had a superficial wound, could support Chris's version of events. So does the timing of the incident: Chris and his friends had left the scene well before Lesley Beamer was stabbed. The brawl consisted of several different fights involving at least eighteen people, and the fight involving Lesley Beamer took place at some distance up the street from that involving Kevin and Chris. There were plenty of witnesses to confirm all these points for the defence, had they chosen to call them.

Besides the murder, Chris was charged on two counts of wounding. He admitted these, but he was confident that he could prove to Manchester Crown Court that he was innocent of the murder. Using all the documents that Chris's family had given me, I put together a picture of what happened on that night of 20 January 1984, outside the Fox public house in Church Street, Eccles. I didn't think that Chris had been responsible for the death of Lesley Beamer. I'd have liked to see confirmation of this from his twin brother Kevin. But that was no more available to me than
it was to the court that tried Chris.

The defence case heard by the court

This is where the preparation and conduct of the case by the defence becomes important. The defence solicitor was Tom Burke, and the clerk who Chris and his family thought was their solicitor was Roger Leggett. The QC who was instructed to lead Chris's defence advised him to plead guilty to manslaughter (an option offered by the prosecution), so Chris lost confidence in him, and he was represented by junior counsel Mr Broadley.

The results of the neglect of the case affected every area of evidence. No pathologist gave evidence, and so Dr Garratt's opinion that Chris's knife could have caused the fatal wound was never challenged. No evidence that other knives were found at the scene was put before the court, nor was any evidence heard from those who had seen other participants with knives in their hands. No one told the jury that the affray actually consisted of several different fights. As far as the jury knew, the only person involved in the fight with a knife was Chris: only one fight, only one person who could have committed the crime.

Crucially, Kevin Beamer was not called as a witness. In consequence, the jury did not know even of his existence.

The issue was further confused because Chris's counsel instructed him to plead not guilty on all counts. Clearly Chris was guilty of wounding two other men, so when he pleaded not guilty to this, he appeared to be lying stupidly; and then (as he and his family remember clearly) Judge Hollings instructed the jury in his summing up: 'if you find the defendant guilty on the wounding charges, you must also find him guilty of murder.'

It is not surprising that Chris was convicted. But when he said he wanted to appeal, the solicitor's clerk told him he could not do so.

Christopher Danks BA

One of the reasons why Chris had little control over his own defence was that at the time he was scarcely literate. In prison, he educated himself, until he was able to gain an honours degree in Design. Chris selected me as one of the few permitted to attend his own personal degree ceremony in Lindholme Prison, at which the vice chancellor of his university came to award him his BA in person. A prison governor expressed the pride of the prison service in this achievement. Offers of employment came from those who'd seen Chris's work on textile design. I thought naïvely that at least he would be released. His tariff date - the earliest date for his release set by the Home Office - was long past. Chris may have been an unemployed, semi-literate petty drug dealer when he was convicted, but now he was well-educated and able to contribute to society. He had become the sort of friend I knew I could trust. What was the point of keeping him in prison?

I was wrong. Chris is still in prison, in closed conditions. He has not had any time in the world outside prison for over sixteen years. Perhaps one day the prison service will run out of excuses for wasting public money by keeping him inside. Or is the only way to get Chris out of prison to have a successful appeal?

Challenging the conviction

Sixteen years of protesting his innocence: why has Chris not yet had a hearing at the appeal court?

Audrey Danks has been unflagging in her attempts to have the case reopened. She took the papers to one solicitor after another. Most of them told her, after a long period of time, that it looked as if Chris had a good case, and that for several hundred pounds they'd be prepared to look at it more carefully. The family didn't have the money. Each time Audrey recovered the papers and started looking for another solicitor.

When I'd investigated the case, I thought it was one that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) should deal with. But first I thought we should try for an appeal directly, because this would be a quicker route than joining the two-year waiting list at the CCRC. I reasoned that if Chris put in his own appeal, with my help, we would be able to state the whole of the case as we saw it, without letting lawyers intervene and reduce our argument in the way they always do. What had lawyers done for Chris in the past?

Our intention wasn't to dispense with lawyers altogether, but just to get leave to appeal and then to bring in the lawyers. Applications are first looked at by just one judge, and in this case the single judge refused leave to appeal. He said that although our case was persuasive, we couldn't prove any of it since the relevant evidence and witnesses would have long since been lost. Meanwhile Audrey had shown our application to some lawyers, who said we should renew our application to the full court. They would like to take the case, pro bono if necessary.

We went to see Chris, and he signed the renewal application. We took it out of the prison and posted it, well within the time limit for renewing it. Some weeks later Vera Baird, a barrister at Tooks Court with plenty of experience in miscarriage of justice cases, said she would help with the case. She checked with the appeal court officers, and discovered that they claimed never to have received the renewal application. Chris then tried to send off duplicate forms, but was obstructed by prison officials. Eventually the renewal application reached a single judge, who decided that he would not permit it to go through out of time. After all this, his application had to join the waiting list at the CCRC.

What can we do?

It's difficult to have to face a two year wait for the CCRC to respond to our application. Can we do anything to help in the meantime?

We can try to make life in prison more bearable for Chris, by writing to him and telling him we support his case, and we can try to persuade the prison authorities that Chris presents no danger to the public and should by now be in an open prison, having the regular home leave that he needs to accustom him to the world outside. We can also argue that he should be released on license now.

We can try to find out more to establish exactly what did happen on the night of 20 January 1984, in Church Street, Eccles. Is that impossible after all this time? Perhaps not: Chris's friend who was with him at the time, could be traced. His name is Paul Knoblett, and he and his then girlfriend Lorraine, witnessed the whole event. Chris had instructed his solicitors to interview them and call them as witnesses, but (of course) this did not happen. If we could find Kevin Beamer, the twin brother, then he could support Chris's version of events, and we could (by doing the work his lawyers failed to do) show that the result of the neglect of his case by his solicitor meant that he really did not have a fair trial, and that yet another innocent person has been wasting his life in prison.