We should all accuse

I recently visited a west London art gallery to listen to three people who have committed their lives to fighting miscarriages of justice. In the audience sat dozens of engrossed local people. They were not campaigners or families of those affected, just others keen to learn. Then after the event, I met a woman whose words touched me deeply.

I was at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery in Ealing, the venue for an exhibition called J’Accuse displaying busts of those who had suffered from wrongful imprisonment. The three key speakers at the event on 24 April were Nicole Farhi, a fashion designer turned sculptor, who created the figures; Matt Foot, human rights lawyer; and Sara Kruzan, survivor of one such miscarriage of justice, who joined by videolink from the USA.

With journalist and broadcaster Torin Douglas co-ordinating the discussion, they each described the journey they had travelled and why they have dedicated their lives to exposing the injustices that occur.

The artist

Nicole is an internationally-acclaimed fashion designer who, after a successful career, decided to turn her talents to sculpture. She began to specialise in making miniature busts of people, famous or just fascinating. She told us that one day she read the story of Ethel Rosenberg, an American woman executed for spying for the Soviet Union back in 1953, and learned it was likely that she had been wrongly convicted during a nationwide panic over the fear of communist infiltrators within the USA.

Ethel and her husband, Julius, had been arrested during a period when that “Red threat” was prominent in US politics. Whilst it is likely that Julius had indeed been working for the Communists, the evidence on Ethel has been disputed, even by the prosecutors who had her convicted. Key information leading to the guilty verdict was likely to have been fabricated by witnesses who testified in order to avoid being prosecuted themselves.

The names of the Rosenbergs, who both died in the electric chair, are well known, but the likelihood Ethel was innocent has been kept hidden from the public. Nicole’s discovery of this secret injustice gave her an appetite to study more examples, so she began to research other miscarriages of justice from around the world and decided to commemorate the victims in her work. Some she selected were well-known, others not household names, but all were examples of how the legal system can fail people. She produced 25 mini-sculptures covering 130 years of unfairness, from all around the world including the United Kingdom.

Once these were ready to exhibit, she arranged to debut the display at Pitzhanger Manor, a Grade I listed building in Walpole Park, Ealing. Built in 1804 with a Gallery opened in 1987, it was an ideal venue. Her display was to run from 19 March to 15 June 2025, and would include some evening debates on injustices. I attended the first of these. Nicole told me she was delighted at the public reaction to her display, and the interest in the subject it evoked.

The Advocate

If Nicole unexpectedly found a passion for exposing and tackling legal errors and a way to attract attention and get people thinking and talking, the second participant really had no choice in his life but to take up the challenge. Matt Foot is a defence solicitor who has been involved in fighting cases that have ensured that the wrongly-convicted could go free. Perhaps he had no option but to take that up as a career, because his father Paul was a much-admired campaigning journalist, his great uncle Michael had been a radical MP and led the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983, and his great-grandfather Isaac devised the concept that evolved into legal aid.

So entering the legal profession as a defender of the accused was his destiny, and he has achieved a lot for clients in his lifetime. In addition to the cases he has taken himself, he is a co-director of Appeal, the charity who recently succeeded in getting the conviction of Andrew Malkinson overturned after 17 years in prison for a rape of which he was finally exonerated. Andrew’s bust is on display at the Pitzhanger.

Matt spoke of the difficulty in getting sufficient legal aid funds available for people to get a decent defence, and of the failure of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which just two days earlier had been torn apart at a meeting of the House of Commons Justice Select Committee. Just 2 per cent of applications to that body are referred to the Court of Appeal, staff are rarely in the office, and those employed in that key part of our justice system no longer seem to be the passionate and committed individuals needed to properly assess applications from the wrongly-convicted, as they were when the organisation first started its work in 1997.

The survivor

Sara Kruzan, who joined the meeting remotely from the USA, had been a victim of grooming, being trafficked from the age of 11. When she was 17, she was convicted of killing the man who had abused her for all those years, but was forbidden from using his appalling crimes against her as part of her defence. She spent 19 years in prison, being released in 2013, and was only officially pardoned in 2022. Her statue features in the display.

Since that time she has campaigned against injustice, and in particular for the victims of grooming. “Sara’s Law”, which she has developed, would ensure that judges have the power to hand reduced sentences to survivors of such abuse and would promote assistance for child sex trafficking victims.

The audience

Sara’s presence was a demonstration that injustices occur everywhere, and that it is everyone’s duty to expose and challenge them. Nicole’s figures demonstrate this clearly, and remind us that the problem today is as great as it was in the time of Dreyfus, the Frenchman whose mistreatment led Emile Zola to write about his case in 1894, under the title “J’Accuse”.

Her range of figures goes right up to today, with images of people such as Jo Hamiliton, one of the Post Office managers found guilty of major fraud despite having done nothing wrong. She was let down as no-one investigated the PO’s faulty Horizon computer system, and even when errors in the system were recognised, the management would not admit the mistake.

Nicole told me she knows that, sadly, she will have new subjects to add to her display for the rest of her life because wrongful convictions continue and nobody seems willing or able to do anything about it. Indeed, as Matt had pointed out, legal aid funds for solicitors are being cut to the bone, and investigative journalists prepared to put the time in to deal with the problem are also in short supply as media organisations are reluctant to invest in this topic.

The event had finished, but a member of the audience came up to me and told me that she too had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice and had spent time in prison for a crime committed by her partner who had framed her. She said that even though the judge identified the man’s perjury, and sent him to prison for it, she was still convicted on false evidence and locked up.

The final word

She then turned to me and said: “I want to thank you for your help and support. While I was in prison, it was Inside Time that kept me going. It showed me that people do care about those in jail and gave me comfort, otherwise I do not think I could have got through.”

Those words were not for me, but for those who have written for the paper over the past 35 years and those who really make contributions to the paper today. I passed on her thoughts. At times the news is depressing, but these were the heartfelt words of one of the people for whom those who write the paper work, and it is a pleasure to pass that on to them all.

But I think of those wrongly imprisoned today, including those on cruel punishments such as Imprisonment for Public Protection or Orders for Lifelong Restriction (in Scotland). I think of the mother who just called me to tell me about her son in Scotland on OLR and his parole hearing. He has been in prison for 16 years on a five-year tariff, and was awaiting his 12^th parole Hearing. It was due in March but delayed because the prison could not locate all the relevant papers. It was put back to 28 April so they could be produced.

Yet on that Monday, when he arrived for the hearing, the papers had still not appeared and so, not having this key evidence, the Board said they had no choice but to delay it again. To April 2026. One more year stuck, despairing, losing hope day by day. Many on IPP are also stuck even though the law was scrapped in 2012. These, too, are injustices.

I think of the families with children in prison on Joint Enterprise, convicted for just knowing others who have committed a crime in which they had no part.

We should not need to wait for another 100 years and a new set of sculptured busts of those being cruelly incarcerated in our times for this to end. They need genuine hope, not just comfort.

The photo shows (L-R) Matt Foot, Nicole Farhi, and Torin Douglas at the event. Credit: Roger Green.