| Mark Cleary was arrested in May 1985. In 1986 he
was
convicted, jointly with another man, of murder. The evidence against him
rested entirely on his own 'admissions' to police and the accusation of
the co-accused. He was interviewed over two days by the police. He claims
that on four occasions he asked for a solicitor. He was also refused access
to his parents. He was 19 at the time. No contemporaneous notes were taken;
the only factual record of the interviews is in witness statements written
up by the officers 12 days later. As soon as a solicitor arrived, Cleary
denied the truth of his admissions. He claims that the facts in his confession
were based on information provided by the police; it is now claimed that
these facts are inaccurate, but represented the state of the police's knowledge
at the time of the interview. His conviction was quashed by the Appeal
Court on 3 May 1994, largely due to an investigation undertaken by the
television programme Trial and Error.
 The
Trial
and Error program on the case was presented by David Jessel, who examines
the case in Chapters 1 and 12 - Mark
Cleary: A Murderer's Victim / Day of Judgment - of his 1994
book TRIAL AND ERROR, (now, alas, out of print). This is a long article,
and has, therefore, been presented as a printable version in "pdf" format
(requires Adobe Acrobat). Click on the icon above to view and print out
the document, or right click and use "Save target as" to save to disk.
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