Deputy Tom Kitt and I visited Mr. Danny McNamee at Full Sutton Prison on 21 April last with the full co-operation of the Danny McNamee support group. This is one of the most serious miscarriages of justice among a litany of such miscarriages, including the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire cases. This case must be seen on the same level as the Maguire case and others.
Mr. Danny McNamee is an exceptional risk category A prisoner. The other two elements under this category are standard risk and high risk. Mr. Danny McNamee has been transferred from prison to prison, including Brixton, Parkhurst, Whitemoor, Belmarsh and now Full Sutton. He has spent ten years as an exceptional risk category A prisoner, although the average is four years under this heading. He is being held in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions in a special security unit which denies remand prisoners the right to a fair trial and is a violation of the United Kingdom's obligation under international treaties.
The most serious aspect of this case is that he was originally charged with conspiring to cause explosions within the United Kingdom from January 1983 to January 1984. However, ten days before his trial, the conspiracy charge was pushed back to 1982, which would include the Hyde Park bombing. When the prosecution case concluded, it was found that he could not have been conspiring to cause explosions within the United Kingdom because at the time he was living in the North of Ireland. The charge was amended to suggest that he was conspiring within the United Kingdom or elsewhere to cause a conspiracy within the United Kingdom or elsewhere from 1982 to 1984.
His appeal for re-categorisation came before a committee of the British prison services recently and I am anxious to know if he has been re-categorised. His case in relation to the possibility of another appeal is before the criminal case review committee, which replaced the system of appeals to the British Home Secretary at the end of March. The McNamee case must be given priority.
Another serious element in this case is that in 1991 Mr. Dessie Ellis was extradited from Ireland to Britain to stand trial as an IRA bomb-maker whose fingerprints covered the item in the Saicey Forest cache where one of Danny McNamee's prints was allegedly found. Mr. Dessie Ellis is a self-confessed IRA member who served a ten year sentence in Ireland, having been found in possession of bomb making equipment, including identical home made circuit boards as in the caches. Mr. Danny McNamee has always said he was not a member of the IRA and the IRA acknowledge that fact.
A British jury acquitted Mr. Dessie Ellis on the basis that evidence from the caches had already been used to imprison him in Ireland in 1981 and that he had already served his sentence. He states he made the items which Danny McNamee was accused of making and all the forensic evidence supports this. Documents have been discovered which prove that the Crown knew of Dessie Ellis's existence and that the evidence pointed to him four years before Danny McNamee's arrest. It had matched prints in the arms caches to Dessie Ellis. In clear breach of its legal responsibilities, it deliberately did not disclose this to Danny McNamee's defence at the 1987 trial or the original appeal in 1991. Had the jury at Danny McNamee's trial been aware that the police and the prosecution knew of the identity, background and evidence pointing to the probable manufacture of the devices which he stood accused of making, it is likely they would have taken a different view of the evidence in this case. It is clear that the Crown prosecution was guilty of nondisclosure, which is now the central focus point of his new application for an appeal.
I call on the Government to contact its British counterpart to protest in the strongest possible terms about the imprisonment and mistreatment of Danny McNamee under British law.
