Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Justice for Winston Silcott - too little, too late

by Mandy Baker  |  Socialist Resistance no1  |  page 6

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

Winston Silcott is set to be one of the first to be released from prison following a recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights. In the ruling the Home Secretary has lost the power to veto the release of prisoners who have served longer than minimum term sentences.

For Winston Silcott release has been a long time coming. Despite repeated attempts to re-open Winston's case, he has been left to rot.

Winston has been the victim of a major miscarriage of justice. In 1984 at a party, he was subject a knife attack by another young man, Anthony Smith - a trained boxer who had already made death threats against Winston. In selfdefence Winston retaliated.

He stabbed his attacker who later died of injuries sustained during the fight. Tragic as this may be, it is not an uncommon scenario. Our prisons house many young people who have become mixed up in violence. And as in most cases, Winston was released on bail.

At the same time the police were conducting a racist and oppressive crackdown on Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate. The events led to a riot and in the process a police officer, PC Blakelock, was murdered.

In a frenzied attempt to solve the case, three men were singled out for suspicion. They were Mark Braithwaite, Engin Raghip and Winston Silcott. They became the victims of a systematic, vindictive media campaign. In the Winston Silcott middle of all this, the case of Smith's death came to court and in an atmosphere of hatred Winston was dealt an extremely harsh sentence - life imprisonment.

In 1991, after forensic tests suggested that the police may have fabricated evidence, all three men were cleared of the murder of PC Blakelock and Engin and Mark were freed. All three also received £17,000 compensation for being wrongthe breakdowns .•.