Wrongfully Imprisoned For Murder | Minutes With | UNILAD | @LADbible

i was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 54 years with no [Music] parole [Music] the night of the 15th and 16th of december 1988 three men set out on a series of robberies and during the commission of one of these robberies an old man died from a heart attack having been detained by the perpetrators so three crimes in one night involving three perpetrators a murder two aggravated robberies and an attempted murder there was a huge reward offered for the arrest of the men involved in what became known as the m25 crimes two days after that murder and robberies the police came to my flat kicked off my flat door with guns pointing at me and they arrested me they took me to a police station where i was interrogated for three days all of a sudden i'm sitting in front of two very senior police officers good cop bad cop and they were throwing accusation after accusation accusing me of doing things of being places of having things that i just didn't have so although that was terrifying there was a an element of but i didn't do that i wasn't there that didn't belong to me so i could answer back because i was confident although terrified although angry although young i was still capable of standing up to the police because i knew the truth and the truth was i wasn't involved in what they were accusing me of i wouldn't say that we were used as a scapegoat what i would say is that we were fitted into a crime once the police had already reached a decision that they needed a conviction myself my co-defendant and most of the other residents of the house that i was living in had had brushes with the law some were there on probation some like myself had previous convictions for for minor offenses burglary shoplifting but that's as serious as it got the evidence the police said they had at the time had come from witnesses one of those descriptions was that the main perpetrator was white had blue eyes and fair hair the two black men me and my co-defendant who had dreadlocks have brown eyes the other co-defendant was an african guy so he had even darker skin and short black hair when the police discovered the car that was found at the scene of the murder and carried out forensic examinations of that car they discovered fingerprints were found on that car the fingerprints didn't fit me or the two other men that were already charged with the offences they fitted one individual and that individual became the key witness in my case he incidentally was white had blue eyes and fair hair he was the only one in the whole case who fitted the description of the perpetrator described by the victims when the police discovered those fingerprints on the car at the scene of the murder they didn't go back to that individual and then treat him as a suspect they then conspired with that witness to say that he pushed the car for me and my co-defendants so as the evidence started to point in a different direction rather than the police follow the fact of that evidence they then started to fit us in and that happened on numerous occasions with numerous bits of the evidence that i could go on and on and on about and then they proceeded to charge me with the murder and robberies on the 22nd of december so that was three days after i was arrested and even then when i was charged i didn't believe i was charged even when they put me in the sweat box the little van with very little windows and little cubicle that transported me to brixton prison that same day while i was in that cell in brixton prison and my lawyers would visit me they would bring me the documentation and i would then start to see for the very first time where the evidence had come from that led the police to arrest and charge me so when we arrived at the old bailey for the beginning of my trial i did feel confident i did feel confident that the jury would find us not guilty but the moment came when i was brought back up into the court i was sat in the dock and the jury foreman came in and i knew they were going to find me guilty when none of the jury looked at us and smiled or showed any sign that they were on our side when the judge announced the sentence he could only give one for the conviction of murder and that was a mandatory life sentence and that simply means that you go to prison for the rest of your life and i reacted in the only way an innocent person would i screamed and i shouted at the jury at the court i was 21 years old now and i swore and i frothed at the mouth until i was dragged out of the dock and back down into the the gulag of the the old bailey cells and i wanted to cry i wanted to cry at that moment but i didn't i couldn't take it day by day because those days just blurred into one because i couldn't believe what was happening to me it was so so difficult going out and having that first visit with my family my mother the person who gave birth to me who now had to sit and look at a young boy or a young man convicted of a murder that i tried to convince my family and friends i hadn't committed and they believed me but everybody would have that that shadow of doubt i became a volatile angry young man every time the prison officers came to my cell door to open it and take me out they had to stand back because i came out like a raging ball but i was deeply angry not for a day or a week or a month but for years it festered inside me and it scarred me to this day people knew who i was they knew i was fighting some people supported me most of them thought yeah you're just another one saying you're wrongly convicted in a couple of years you'll accept your guilt and move on that was never going to happen but i remember on on one occasion i met with a guy called richard mckenney billy power they were convicted of a notorious miscarriage of justice called the birmingham six iraq they were mature they were approaching it from a campaigning point of view and i was fighting physically i was suffering as a result mentally and physically but it was during one of the conversations i had with these guys that they said you can't do it like that you're not going to fight your wrongful conviction if you are innocent you need to campaign and you need to do it by winning over the media you need to do it by telling people on the outside and trying to get journalists interested in telling your story there was a bit of me that thought no you're still [ __ ] here and you've got nowhere but it wasn't long before i was watching those guys walk out of the court of appeal because they'd won their conviction one by one years went by the campaign my volatile bitter angerness was still in me but the campaign had changed people outside were starting to support me i won over the media who were now writing stories about the potential miscarriage of justice and eventually that the tide turned the european court of human rights declared that we had been denied the right to a fair trial that information evidence had never been disclosed to our defense luckily for me the bbc rough justice program made a documentary where they secretly filmed an interview with this key blue eye fair hair white guy who admitted on camera during a secret recording that he was paid money by the police and that he conspired with the police and just as that was going on the home secretary intervened and he had promised to make a decision about referring my case back to the court of appeal and then re-nagged and i went on hunger strike and i was on my death bed when um the criminal case review commission having been forced by the european court made a decision to refer my case back to the court of appeals so i was in hospital i was in a bed i'd lost lots of weight it was my last calling if you like it was my last shout for justice and so in july 2000 um this different raphael row i was no longer the 20 year old happy-go-lucky raffle though i was the dead-eye stone-heart anger and bitter 20-year-old that i'd become but also smarter a smarter person a more resilient person than i was and the judges quashed my conviction and they quashed the conviction of my two co-defendants and they said i was free they said i could go home wherever home was going to be i wasn't going back to prison 12 years after that night i was charged i was told i was free and i could go up and i remember them opening that front door me stepping out and my sister who was a big campaigner for me and my family was standing there so for the first time in 12 years i was able to hug someone and cry genuinely cry with joy everybody else around me was crying and it triggered my crying i wasn't able to cry for 12 years that was the first time i shed a tear property for my freedom are you still angry at the jury and the police i'm not as angry or as bitter as i was when i was in prison i made a conscious decision when i walked out of court that i was not going to let it consume the rest of my life like it had the previous 12 years no one since my conviction was quashed has apologized to me and said sorry nobody has been arrested or charged with the crimes that i was wrongly and convicted for in fact i think the police and the courts would to this day still maintain that they got the right people because they have to it was a long time ago now but i don't forget any second of it you

Channel: LADbible TV

Views: 1,913,310

Keywords: the lad bible, lad bible, lad, bible, videos, viral videos, viral, funny, comedy, funny videos, documentaries, exclusives, interviews, journalism, culture, Raphael, Rowe, Murder, prison, false, accused, BLM, race, wrongfully imprisoned, Toughest prisons, netflix, jail, arrested

Id: qijR9H70FDM

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020