Joint enterprise: Successful appeals unlikely to secure compensation despite Supreme Court ruling, lawyers say

Hundreds of cases will be re-examined after the doctrine was found to have been misinterpreted since the mid-1980s

Supreme Court judges ruled that trial judges have wrongly interpreted the joint enterprise law for some three decades, which allows accomplices of crimes to be convicted of the same offence as the actual perpetrator. (EPA)

Hundreds of people convicted for serious offences, including murder, will have their cases re-examined because of a judicial error made 32 years ago, it has emerged.

The Supreme Court found that the controversial legal doctrine of joint enterprise – used to convict more than 600 people, including two of the killers of Stephen Lawrence – has been misinterpreted during criminal trials since the mid-1980s.

Campaigners declared the ruling a major turning point – but lawyers said that few of the hundreds of cases were likely to lead to convictions being quashed. Anyone who is freed is unlikely to be eligible for compensation for the time they have wrongly spent behind bars, legal sources said.

Joint enterprise has been used as an effective prosecution tool in cases involving gang violence. It allows several people to be charged with murder even if they did not strike the fatal blow, or even wield a weapon.

Miscarriage of justice campaigners have claimed that it has been used to convict people who played a relatively minor role in a mass attack of serious offences, including murder. It has been disproportionately used against young black men, statistics show.

The ruling was based on the case of drug dealer Ameen Jogee, who is serving a life sentence with a minimum 18-year term after egging on his friend to kill a former policeman in 2012. Jogee was jailed for murder even though he did not inflict the fatal blow or go into the house where the murder was committed.

The Supreme Court ruled that judges had taken a “wrong” turn in 1984 when deciding that someone would be guilty of murder if they “foresaw” the possibility that an accomplice might try to kill or maim. A panel of five judges ruled that this was not, in fact, enough to prove murder.

“This is a major turning point in British justice,” said Deborah Madden of the campaign group Jengba (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association). “The joint enterprise rule has been used to get mass convictions without evidence. It has caused devastation for families. We know of 650 people who we think will be affected by the ruling – and we don’t know everyone.”

Miscarriage of justice campaigners said that cases involving joint enterprise convictions formed a large part of their caseload. In one case, three men were convicted of murder even though a fellow gang member was responsible for inflicting the fatal blow when he grabbed a knife as they chased their victim through a chicken shop.

Janet Cunliffe, whose son Jordan received a life sentence for his role in the 2007 murder of Garry Newlove in Warrington, said the ruling meant that the “right people” would be spared prison.

She has campaigned for the law to change since her son was ordered to serve at least 12 years for the fatal attack on the father-of-three, who was kicked to death after confronting vandals. Mrs Cunliffe said that her son’s partial blindness meant that he could not even have seen properly what was happening. “What has happened today has proved all the campaigners right,” she said.

Despite the error dating back to 1984, lawyers said that someone found to have been wrongly convicted of the most serious crimes would still be unlikely to secure compensation for their time served in prison. Daniel Machover, who works on miscarriage of justice cases for law firm Hickman and Rose, said that compensation payments for time wrongly spent in prison depended on them being exonerated because of “new or newly discovered facts”.

That was unlikely to apply in joint enterprise appeals, he said.

“Those who are successful and are now found to have suffered a miscarriage of justice because of the 30-year long misinterpretation of the law on joint enterprise will not receive any compensation for time served in prison and financial loss,” he said.

Joint enterprise: Famous cases

• Gary Dobson and David Norris were convicted under joint enterprise in 2012 for the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, who was stabbed to death by a gang in a racially motivated murder in south-east London when he was 18.

• Three teenagers, Adam Swellings, Stephen Sorton and Jordan Cunliffe, were jailed for life in January 2008 for the murder of Garry Newlove, who was attacked in August 2007 after he confronted a group outside his house in Warrington, Cheshire. Cunliffe’s mother, Janet, claims that although he was at the scene he did not take part in the murder.

• Three convicted murderers won the right to appeal after a fellow gang member confessed to stabbing the victim during a fight between rival groups in London in 2007. All four were jailed for life for murdering Prabaskaran Kannan, 28, even though they had not been armed with the knife when they turned up for the pre-arranged fight. The four, Aziz Miah, Asif Kumbay, Kirush Nanthakumar and Vabeesan Sivarajah, had previously lost an appeal against their conviction in 2009, accusing each other of doing it. Since that ruling, Sivarajah said that he alone wielded the knife.

• Football agent Andrew Taylor and sports-event manager Timmy Donovan were jailed for seven years and six months and six years and 10 months respectively for beating to death off-duty policeman PC Neil Doyle on his Christmas work night out in Liverpool in 2014. Neither defendant admitted throwing the fatal punch, which ruptured his vertebral artery.

• Samantha Joseph was jailed for 10 years for the killing of Shakilus Townsend after acting as a “honey trap” to lure the 16-year-old to his death when she was 15 in 2008. She led Shakilus to a quiet cul-de-sac in Thornton Heath, south London, where he was beaten with baseball bats and stabbed six times by her older boyfriend, Danny McLean. They were both convicted of murder.

• Five teenagers were given jail sentences totalling 76 years in 2011 over the killing of 15-year-old Zac Olumegbon, who was stabbed as he arrived at Park Campus Academy, in West Norwood, south London, in July 2010.