| Background |
| Imprisoned for crimes for which
he still maintains his innocence, David (G) Ashberry found that one week
in March 1997 changed his life. It started on the Sunday afternoon with
no indication of what was to follow. David and his girlfriend made a hurried
visit to the family home in Middleton (which is in Manchester, England)
to give his Mum a gift for Mother's day. David was involved in a rap group
and felt that he was letting them down if he was late especially as they
were currently preparing an important demo. |
| Next day, David called in at
Middleton and talked with his Dad about the decoration of a flat he was
planning to take. They discussed the progress on the demo and David said
that he needed to do some more work because his late arrival the previous
day had held things up. Later two of his friends confirmed that they had
been preparing a demo at that time and had been working together on the
Monday evening. However that evening as the young men rapped in a flat
in Princess Road, South Manchester two black males were preparing for an
armed robbery on an off licence at the Racecourse Estate in Sale. That
robbery went horribly wrong with the killing of an innocent shopkeeper
who tried to defend himself against the gunman with a machete. |
| On the following Saturday evening
after leaving a friend's house, David set off in his car to be surprised
by a group of police cars blocking and surrounding him. |
| After interviewing him for
hours after his arrest for the murder, the only evidence the police had
was a statement from Natalie Collins, who lived near the off licence. David
knew Natalie through an acquaintance Tony who temporarily unable to drive
through injury appreciated getting lifts to Natalie's flat. Despite the
anomalies they encountered, police charged David with murder and later
added an armed robbery at a post office. |
| Right from the beginning we
have believed that the facts pointed to someone else having committed the
murder. One fact is the certainty of the gunman
having been wounded. |
| At the trial the prosecution
claimed that the victim had previously lost the strength in his wrist and
forearm and was unable to strike a telling blow with the machete. His father-in-law
admitted under cross examination that the murdered man had recovered his
grip and that they both used the sharp machete to open boxes at the shop.
There were fibres on the machete, which would indicate that it had cut
through material, drops of blood outside the shop, and an eye witness outside
the shop described how the gunman held his arm to his side and stumbled
as he tried to leave the scene of the crime. Naturally police made extensive
enquiries at hospitals through Greater Manchester for a black male with
wounds to his forearm and abdomen. |
| As they searched and arrested
David on the Saturday, one jubilant officer lifting David's sweater said,
"Let's see your new appendix scars". |
| The police were surprised that
there were no cuts, wounds, scars or even bruising. |
| Natalie
Collins |
| Four days after the murder
the police had raided Natalie Collins's flat for firearms and she subsequently
made several statements including the allegation that Tony, her ex-boyfriend,
had told her that he and David had attempted to rob the off licence and
that David had done the shooting and left her flat in his silver grey car. |
| It was also claimed that Collins
alleged David, Tony and his brother Lee were responsible for a post office
robbery in Sale a few weeks earlier. |
| This was only circumstantial
evidence but there was so much potential for forensic evidence. |
| Lack
of physical evidence |
| Forensic tests were carried
out on:- |
| The post office and off licence
premises; a stolen car and a pickaxe handle supposedly used in the PO robbery;
the silver grey car driven by David; David's hair, skin and clothing which
would have been showered with gunpowder if he had fired a gun; the machete
used by the victim and spots of blood outside the off licence. The sum
of the findings was a nano gramme (one thousandth part of a gramme) of
nitro glycerine in the passenger footwell of David's car. That microscopic
speck is borderline to even being recognised; it can come from a number
of sources; is not consistent with the presence of a gun and in that quantity
is likely to be from contamination when the car was searched. |
| There was also Natalie's flat
where David allegedly spent the night prior to the post office robbery
and was supposed to have visited twice on the evening of the murder. |
| An exhaustive police search
failed to produce any forensic evidence that either David Ashberry or Lee
Watt had ever been in the flat: Lee's brother Tony said that he never asked
any of his friends into the flat because it was never cleaned. Forensic
analysis had failed to identify either a finger or palm print, hair or
fibre or anything linking David to that flat at any time. |
| Police must also have noticed
that David didn't match the facial and description given by eye witnesses
at either of the offences for which they had been hunting for him. |
| The eye witnesses from outside
the off licence provided facial and height details which clearly described
a different person and naturally they did not pick David out from the identification
parade for which he readily volunteered. |
| Seven eye-witnesses at the
scene of the post office robbery described the tallest of the three masked
robbers to be under 6' - very similar to the taller robber involved in
the murder: David is 6'4". |
| Prosecution
witness |
| At the trial the only evidence
submitted for the post office charge was the claim by Collins that David
and the two others she named had stayed at her flat on the night prior
to the crime. Collins claimed that the three suspects had been in her flat
when she left before 9 am on the morning of the robbery. During the course
of her short trip she passed the post office. She found that it had been
robbed and returned to her flat to find the three were there. No evidence
was offered to suggest that any of the three had left the flat while Collins
was out. There was no person nor no evidence collaborating Collins' story. |
| Under cross examination, Natalie
Collins admitted that she had included Lee's name in her statement at the
suggestion of the police. |
| When questioned about the off
licence and her relations with Tony Watt, Collins admitted to benefiting
as a result of her statements, made ten contradictions with her own statements;
further contradictions of her evidence were made by other prosecution witnesses;
she showed disrespectful behaviour - admitted that she was being sarcastic
to the court; swore at the judge and barristers - stormed out of court
four times; she refused to answer some questions from defence barristers.
By the judge's refusal to hold her in contempt, Collins was effectively
allowed to select which questions she answered and which she chose to avoid.
The questions she avoided were significantly related to her dealings with
the police. |
| In his summing up Judge Sachs
excused Collins' behaviour and invited the jury to consider whether Collins'
story was too incredible to be untrue. Strange logic - does it mean that
the bigger the lie, the more likely he feels it is believable? Or was the
story simply created after David's arrest with the help of other people? |
| Role
of Police |
| There was intense pressure
on the police to produce a result following criticism of their lack of
response to previous problems on the estate. |
| However police didn't follow
up evidence of Collins' neighbour who saw a dark blue car being driven
away when Collins claimed that the only car driven away from her flat shortly
after the murder was David's silver grey car. |
| Why did the police ignore other
leads? Informants on the Racecourse Estate were attributing both crimes
to another pair but the police, without investigation, dismissed that as
"rumour". Thanks to their deal with Natalie Collins, a murderer escaped
punishment and could still be at large. |
| The machete used by the dead
man was covered in blood yet only a swab was taken and the machete was
wiped clean without the defence having an opportunity to arrange tests.
On the basis of that small sample it was represented to the jury that all
of the blood on the machete was the blood of the dead man. |
| The jury may have drawn incorrect
conclusions from David's attitude after being arrested. However his previous
experience of the racist attitude of many police made him wary of answering
their questions. |
| Contrary to a police briefing
to the press, David was not estranged from his adoptive family. Why did
they feel the need to lie about this? One investigative journalist feels
that the more dodgy the conviction, the greater the smokescreen of lies
the police put out after the trial. |
| His bedroom has been described
by the police as a shrine to guns - another police lie. After searching
the room, police found no firearms, no replica guns, no books on guns nor
magazines on guns or even on shooting as a sport. The walls, covered in
posters, mainly Bob Marley plus other black icons. |
| The police even tried to claim
that David's rapping name "G Rok" was really glox which is apparently slang
for a kind of gun. That sort of imagination could have been of great help
developing Natalie Collins' story. |
| Summary |
| Unbelievably the jury returned
guilty verdicts for the post office robbery and murder on David and Tony.
They were given life sentences. What does it say for our system of justice
when, despite Natalie's lies and contradictions, her sarcasm and undisguised
contempt for the court, and her refusal to answer critical defence questions,
the jury then decided that a 6'4" youth, with no wounds, scars, bruises
or any significant forensic evidence against him, was responsible for a
murder committed by a male less than 6' tall who was wounded in the process. |
| David's family and friends,
are united in their belief in his innocence. With a new legal team we are
gathering new evidence and reviewing the procedures followed in the trial
and case preparation. We are committed to overturning this miscarriage
of justice, and hope that in the process the people who, through dishonesty,
negligence or corruption have robbed David (G) of his liberty are exposed
and punished.
David's appeal was turned down on 3 December 1998. He applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, asking it to refer
his case back to the Court of Appeal. The CCRC refused to make a referral, and their decision was challenged at a judicial review on 3 December 2004 by M. Birnbaum QC, instructed by Robert Lizar Solicitors. |
| You may not have realised that
you can help correct this miscarriage of justice but we are asking for
your support. |
