Clive Freeman

[Bill Robertson]

https://empowerinnocent.wixsite.com/ccrcwatch/post/innocent-no-case-to-answer-the-case-of-clive-freeman

[gringo]

https://empowerinnocent.wixsite.com/ccrcwatch/post/innocent-no-case-to-answer-the-case-of-clive-freeman

  So much to unpick there, Bill, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Clive Freeman's wrongful conviction and subsequent treatment by the CCRC and courts is shocking and should be the main takeaway from your excellent article/link. His mistreatment at the hands of the "justice system" is a tale of lies and collusion in those lies by arse covering, self serving and corrupted servants at every level of the justice system. Investigators, expert prosecution witnesses, judges and even the "watchdogs" are all exposed in this sorry tale.
     Dr. Richard Shepherd is a very "interesting" character. Princess Diana, Jo Cox, Hungerford... I could go on.
     It is thanks to the fortitude of people such as Clive Freeman, refusing to acknowledge guilt and still behind bars 44 years into a 13 year recommended life sentence, that we get to peek at the real corruption and criminality infesting the whole body of the "justice system". 
     I will give your article a deserved second reading later when I have more time to consider all the implications raised. 
     
   

[Steve_uk]

So we're asked to believe a man is innocent, who took out a £300,000 insurance policy on his life , changed his name, left three bottles of whisky in his flat as a present for the landlord and booked into a hotel the very evening Alexander Calder Hardie of all the flats in London just happened to break into Freeman's and met his end, whilst Freeman blabbed his intention to defraud the insurance company to his brother beforehand.

[gringo]

So we're asked to believe a man is innocent, who took out a £300,000 insurance policy on his life , changed his name, left three bottles of whisky in his flat as a present for the landlord and booked into a hotel the very evening Alexander Calder Hardie met his end, blabbing his intention to defraud the insurance company to his brother beforehand.

    Irrelevant and misrepresentation. There was no crime! There is no murder for him to be guilty of. From the article below;

The prosecution alleged that Clive Freeman lured Alexander Hardie (an alleged tramp(4)) to his flat and murdered him so that he could claim £300,000 on insurance by falsely representing the body of Hardie as Freeman. Clive Freeman points out that the claim is absurd for the following reasons: Hardie was 5’ 6” tall and weighed 140lbs and had hardly any teeth due to disease. Hardie only had three fingers on his left hand. Freeman was six feet tall and weighed 200lbs and had all his teeth and fingers. Furthermore, Hardie was not a vagrant. He lived at 49 Glanville Road, Brixton SW2. Hardie was a convicted burglar; he was identified by fingerprints held by the police.


Freeman says that he was no longer living at his flat when Hardie died which, it appears, Hardie may have entered for the purpose of burglary or simply to consume whatever he found there. Freeman had left three bottles of whisky in the flat as a present for the landlord. Police photographs show that two and a half bottles of whisky had been consumed, presumably by Hardie. The prosecution pathologist, Dr Taylor said that Hardie had 392ml of alcohol in his blood.


After waiting five months for a passport to be issued and then waiting for a visa to visit the USA, Freeman left the UK on a long-planned business trip to the USA on 16 April, the same day that Hardie was discovered dead in the flat. It appears that contrary to what the prosecution alleged, Hardie, having entered the flat, consumed a large amount of whisky, fell over and accidentally caused a fire. His death was quite likely accidental and self-inflicted.


     He can't have planned the day that the Home Office would finally grant a visa, amongst other things left out of your no context misrepresentation. None of this matters though because there was no murder.
Nine eminent expert pathology experts have completely demolished Shepherd's evidence. His theory now thoroughly discredited. Hardie died of natural causes.
     Read the article again, Steve, perhaps making special note of the criticisms of Shepherd by all other experts. I will post a few highlights in my next post. You must have missed them first time round.

[Steve_uk]

I didn't miss anything. This is one of those cases based on circumstantial evidence, which is put before a jury. The jury took less than an hour to convict.

[gringo]

    Here are a few snippets of the expert opinions about Dr. Richard Shepherd's. Below from Professor Bernard Knight, Home office pathologist since 1965 and professor of Forensic pathology since 1980 Univ. of Wales college of Medicine;

 In common with Professors Crane, Mant, Milrroy and Dr Acland, I do not agree with Dr Shepherd’s interpretation of the injuries and cause of death.


There is an internal contradiction in his opinion, as he gives the cause of death as 'suffocation' yet claims the mechanism was due to compression of the chest.


The two entities are quite different, as suffocation is due to complete obstruction of the nose and mouth preventing entry of air, whilst compression of the chest is the prevention of respiratory excursions by pressure, even though the air passages are open. This is generally known as 'traumatic asphyxia' and one of the almost inevitable hallmarks of the condition is intense cyanosis (blueness) of the face, neck, and upper chest, with well-marked petechial haemorrhages in the eyes, eyelids, face, lips, and skin. In fact, these are more pronounced in traumatic asphyxia than any other condition.


They were completely absent in this case...
Thus, Dr Shepherd's stated cause of death as 'Suffocation' seems based on no evidence whatsoever, apart from conjecture.


Similarly, his contention that it was due to compression of the chest (which is at odds with his suffocation claim) has virtually no supporting evidence. There were no petechial haemorrhages or facial congestion, which in itself virtually rules out the diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia.

 

     It is worth noting that Richard Shepherd's first autopsy on 16 April 1988 gave alcohol and acute pancreatitis as the probable cause of death. These notes were withheld from the defence at trial only coming to light later.
     Shepherd's findings are in tatters by any objective reading of the expert opinion not only  contradicting his findings but demonstrating that his theory is impossible. Below from the CCRC submission;

 1. There is now incontrovertible evidence that Shepherd's theory - both in the autopsy and court - that pressure to the lower chest could produce asphyxia was science fiction.


    Science fiction.
    As numerous experts make clear. There is no murder for Clive Freeman to be guilty of.

[gringo]

So we're asked to believe a man is innocent, who took out a £300,000 insurance policy on his life , changed his name, left three bottles of whisky in his flat as a present for the landlord and booked into a hotel the very evening Alexander Calder Hardie met his end, blabbing his intention to defraud the insurance company to his brother beforehand.

    The points that you raise here are pretty much the entire so-called circumstantial evidence against Freeman. Sometimes, circumstantial "evidence" is just a rather grand euphemism for coincidence or unfortunate happenstance, as can be shown in this case.

https://www.thejusticegap.com/i-got-more-justice-from-robert-mugabe-than-got-here/

    From the inside time article linked above;

 Freeman, a brilliant horseman, joined a Rhodesian mounted infantry unit known as the Grey Scouts to fight the insurgents. After independence, he was involved in a plot to undermine the new political regime.

Freeman was heartbroken to leave his family, drinking heavily and most likely suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. He had witnessed comrades die in what was known as the Bush War and ended up on death row for 90 days at Chikarubi maximum security prison before being transferred to Salisbury prison, in which he was locked up for five months for 23 hours-a-day with 42 inmates in a cell built for eight.

He was in a desperate state when he arrived in London. Instead of writing letters, he would exchange recorded tapes with family and friends. Much of the evidence used against him was in the form of transcripts of drunken ‘stream-of-consciousness’ rants in which Freeman told his brother that he was contemplating suicide, rearranging his insurance and thinking about a fraudulent claim. He thought he had bowel cancer and was concerned that its discovery would invalidate his policy.

And then, Freeman contends, Alexander Hardie set himself on fire leaving a (cancer-free) corpse in his flat. Just before, Freeman changed his name and, on the day when the body was discovered, he left the country. The jury took less than an hour to convict.



      Given this history and the visa arrival on 16 April, after five months waiting, Freeman's actions fall into the category of unfortunate happenstance.
      He could not have planned for his visa to arrive on that day. His departure, name change and change of policy all have more mundane and plausible explanations. From inside time again below;

When I put it to Freeman that it all sounds too great a coincidence, he insisted that’s exactly what it was: “a coincidence”. “It didn’t happen how they told it at court,” he said.

Freeman told me that he hadn’t ‘fled’ London, but had been arranging his departure for months and that his name change was because he planned to return to Zimbabwe without attracting the attention of the new regime. He said he also needed to change his life insurance because the political volatility in Zimbabwe had rendered his old policy worthless. He said his threats of suicide was a mixture of despair and inebriated attention-seeking and that, more than anything, he wanted his wife back.

Freeman did not take the stand at his trial so the jury didn’t get to hear his side of the story. He chose not to because he thought he had a watertight alibi: he had stayed in a hotel on the night Hardie died and the receptionist gave evidence that he would not have been able to leave the hotel and re-enter without her noticing.

Freeman was clearly in a bad way in London, but was he so out of his mind to think that he could have gotten away with it? Hardie made an improbable body-double. Freeman was a big man, over six foot and 15 stone; whereas Hardie was five foot seven, less than 10 stone and missing a finger. Then there was the bizarre medical evidence. The Crown alleged that Hardie had been murdered by a technique known as ‘burking’ – described by the judge as “kneeling on the chest with his knees and hands to make sure that no breath goes into the lungs”. It owes its name to Burke and Hare who murdered 16 people in the 19th Century to supply unmarked cadavers to medical students in Edinburgh.

The jury had to choose between diametrically opposing views. Dr Richard Shepherd, just two years into his career as a pathologist, came up with the eye-catching ‘burking’ theory. But this was countered by another pathologist of 44 years’ experience who offered the more prosaic alternative that Hardie’s heart gave way as a result of drink and drugs. Dr Shepherd told the court that Freeman would have learned the technique in the Grey Scouts but – as the new application to the miscarriage of justice watchdog makes clear – there has never been any evidence submitted to support that notion.

The CCRC application contains new support from four experts adding to the evidence submitted to it by six pathologists over the past decade rubbishing the ‘burking’ theory. Freeman’s legal team are especially critical of the Commission’s failure to instruct an independent pathologist to review the medical evidence.

Three years ago, eight new boxes of paperwork to do with Freeman’s case were explored. This process revealed Dr Shepherd’s notes from a first post-mortem, recording the most probable cause of Hardie’s death as alcoholism and acute pancreatitis. Nine days later, he had changed his mind and found bruising cited in support of the ‘burking’ theory. The jury did not hear this evidence.



    How can Freeman be guilty, when no crime has been committed?

[gringo]

     No other pathologist shares Shepherd's theory. It is unanimously dismissed by every other expert but the CCRC keep asking Shepherd to mark his own homework, whilst ignoring the fact that not a single other pathologist who has studied the evidence agrees with his findings.
      To quote Professor Crane, former State pathologist of Northern Ireland and now professor of Forensic Medicine Queen's Univ. of Belfast, one of the experts referred earlier;

in my opinion, the standard of his post- mortem examination was below that expected of a pathologist on the Home Office Register. The 'excuse' for not taking sections for microscopy is wholly unacceptable and demonstrates a failure...

      "Below that expected of a pathologist on the Home Office Register"
      It is all pretty damning stuff and Shepherd's findings now have no credibility. It was on his third examination that Shepherd came to these conclusions. Not the first two?
      No other pathologist shares his "third opinion".
      That is 0/10.
      The other ten are scathing of Shepherd's thoroughly debunked theory.
      How many ways can you put this? There was no murder, therefore there is no murderer. Clive Freeman is innocent.

[gringo]

Three years ago, eight new boxes of paperwork to do with Freeman’s case were explored. This process revealed Dr Shepherd’s notes from a first post-mortem, recording the most probable cause of Hardie’s death as alcoholism and acute pancreatitis. Nine days later, he had changed his mind and found bruising cited in support of the ‘burking’ theory. The jury did not hear this evidence.

Father Hugh Sinclair first met Freeman in 1989 as s chaplain at Wormwood Scrubs Prison. “For me, his innocence seems obvious,” he told me. “The Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and Carl Bridgewater defendants were all under my pastoral [care]. You develop a sixth sense. It’s difficult to keep telling lies in prison and expecting people to believe them.”

Clive Freeman is due for a Parole Board hearing next month, which will determine whether he can be safely released back into the community. “They used to ask me ‘are you in denial?’,” he said last month. “In 1998 my wife was dying and they said ‘if you changed your stance you’d be out in 18 months’… But how could I? I am an innocent man.”

     This is exactly the kind of fortitude that I acknowledged earlier in the thread;

    It is thanks to the fortitude of people such as Clive Freeman, refusing to acknowledge guilt and still behind bars 44 years into a 13 year recommended life sentence, that we get to peek at the real corruption and criminality infesting the whole body of the "justice system".

    He could have taken the path of least resistance, got his freedom 20 years ago by admitting guilt. He won't because he still maintains innocence and so remains behind bars. 10 out of 11 pathology experts agree with him.



   

[Roch]

  So much to unpick there, Bill, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Clive Freeman's wrongful conviction and subsequent treatment by the CCRC and courts is shocking and should be the main takeaway from your excellent article/link. His mistreatment at the hands of the "justice system" is a tale of lies and collusion in those lies by arse covering, self serving and corrupted servants at every level of the justice system. Investigators, expert prosecution witnesses, judges and even the "watchdogs" are all exposed in this sorry tale.
     Dr. Richard Shepherd is a very "interesting" character. Princess Diana, Jo Cox, Hungerford... I could go on.
     It is thanks to the fortitude of people such as Clive Freeman, refusing to acknowledge guilt and still behind bars 44 years into a 13 year recommended life sentence, that we get to peek at the real corruption and criminality infesting the whole body of the "justice system". 
     I will give your article a deserved second reading later when I have more time to consider all the implications raised. 
     
   

Indeed.

I don't know about this case. 44 years? 

[gringo]

Indeed.

I don't know about this case. 44 years? 

  35 years, he was 44 at the time of conviction.
      ?
     An unimportant detail anyway

[gringo]

Indeed.

I don't know about this case. 44 years? 

   Thought the Jo Cox case would grab your attention.
      There is a suggestion that his findings in the Freeman/Hardie case were not his own and that he was acting under instruction from others. That he came across "burking" as the means used, thoroughly debunked, after his third post mortem is odd. It is not supported by any other expert. This case only two years into his career either demonstrated that he was a "safe pair of hands" or that he was given the role because it was already known that he was, in my opinion.
      Since then he has been involved in so many high profile cases that have attracted scepticism from many towards the official findings. The findings of Shepherd.
      I listed only a few. If you search Dr Richard Shepherd, you will find many more.
       

[Steve_uk]

   Thought the Jo Cox case would grab your attention.
      There is a suggestion that his findings in the Freeman/Hardie case were not his own and that he was acting under instruction from others. That he came across "burking" as the means used, thoroughly debunked, after his third post mortem is odd. It is not supported by any other expert. This case only two years into his career either demonstrated that he was a "safe pair of hands" or that he was given the role because it was already known that he was, in my opinion.
      Since then he has been involved in so many high profile cases that have attracted scepticism from many towards the official findings. The findings of Shepherd.
      I listed only a few. If you search Dr Richard Shepherd, you will find many more.
     

I haven't found any yet. I sympathize with Richard Shepherd insofar as he was put upon by his superiors, the imposition working insidiously on his mental health. I would only say that there are many stressful jobs out there: doctors ministering to their cancer patients, teachers fretting about pupils in their charge, nurses witnessing the horrific injuries of road traffic victims, soldiers engaged in the theatre of war.

It's quite usual for Type A personalities to experience burnout as they move into middle age and beyond, especially when juggling the work-life balance and trying to have it all: gaining a pilot's licence, keeping bees, walking dogs, reading a bedtime story to the children-all laudable activities, but the cumulative effect of trying to be superdad in this brave new touchy-feely world finally took its toll. It might have been better had he tried to mend his marriage with Jen, rather than embarking on a new journey with Linda, who may well have viewed him as one of her patients rather than the goal of lifetime partner marriage should always strive to be. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/26/forensic-pathologist-richard-shepherd-ptsd-cutting-up-23000-bodies-not-normal

[gringo]

  Since then he has been involved in so many high profile cases that have attracted scepticism from many towards the official findings. The findings of Shepherd.
      I listed only a few. If you search Dr Richard Shepherd, you will find many more.

      I haven't found any yet.





      Below reporting of Shepherd being the pathologist on Thomas Mair case;

https://www.itv.com/news/update/2016-11-19/court-silenced-by-statement-of-jo-coxs-last-moments

   Below a report about Shepherd being the pathologist who reexamined Diana's body for the official inquiry;

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Doctor+who+examined+Princess+Diana%27s+body+reveals+odd+questions+he+was...-a0555459876/
   Below a report about Shepherd and the autopsies in the Hungerford killings;

   https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6195361/Pathologist-worked-Hungerford-massacre-suffered-PTSD-30-years-later.html

   Another Mail report below which also shows Shepherd involved in Gareth Williams mysterious death;

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9986029/Forensic-pathologist-shares-harrowing-stories-career.html

   

[Steve_uk]

Since then he has been involved in so many high profile cases that have attracted scepticism from many towards the official findings. The findings of Shepherd.
      I listed only a few. If you search Dr Richard Shepherd, you will find many more.

      I haven't found any yet.





      Below reporting of Shepherd being the pathologist on Thomas Mair case;

https://www.itv.com/news/update/2016-11-19/court-silenced-by-statement-of-jo-coxs-last-moments

   Below a report about Shepherd being the pathologist who reexamined Diana's body for the official inquiry;

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Doctor+who+examined+Princess+Diana%27s+body+reveals+odd+questions+he+was...-a0555459876/
   Below a report about Shepherd and the autopsies in the Hungerford killings;

   https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6195361/Pathologist-worked-Hungerford-massacre-suffered-PTSD-30-years-later.html

   Another Mail report below which also shows Shepherd involved in Gareth Williams mysterious death;

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9986029/Forensic-pathologist-shares-harrowing-stories-career.html

   

I'm aware of these high-profile cases, but where is the scepticism you claim contained therein?