Jeremy Bamber, who is serving life for the 1985 murder of his adopted parents, sister and her twin children, is waiting for the miscarriage of justice watchdog to rule on his latest application to put fresh evidence of his innocence before the appeal court.
This is the third time Bamber has been before the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) and the first where he has had significant disclosure about the Essex police investigation and prosecution.
His lawyer perfected eight issues of appeal in 2021. The CCRC, says Bamber, has taken three years to review just three of them.
Last month, the activist’s activist, Peter Tatchell, led innocence campaigners in a demonstration outside the watchdog’s headquarters.
The question now being asked more widely is whether the CCRC is fit for the purpose of rooting out judicial and police corruption when it is stuffed with ex-law enforcement and establishment types.
It follows the watchdog’s appalling record over the case of Andy Malkinson, the man who served more than 17 years in prison after he was wrongly convicted of rape in 2003.
APPEAL, a justice organisation, did the leg work for six years to get Malkinson acquitted last year because the CCRC - who had twice refused his application - didn’t.
A simple test of the victim’s clothing samples - Greater Manchester Police had destroyed the actual items contrary to their own protocol - revealed the DNA of another man, who still remains at large.
Disclosure that APPEAL forced from the cops further revealed the dishonesty of the main police witnesses, a couple of petty crooks, one with a heroin habit, who were facing prosecution at the time they claimed to have seen Malkinson at the scene of the crime. Fancy that.
Worst still, they were presented at court as honest witnesses and their criminal records withheld from the defence.
A month after his acquittal in July 2023, the government, forced by public outrage, ordered an independent judge-led inquiry into the conduct of the police, Crown Prosecution Service and CCRC.
Two film makers, Fran Robertson and Jemma Gander, had followed Malkinson, his family and APPEAL’s fight for justice since his release on license in December 2020.
Their company, Two-Step Films, had no commission from a broadcaster and no idea if Malkinson would ever be vindicated.
When he was, the BBC bought their fine film after it was clear this was a massive miscarriage of justice and bravely broadcast it earlier this month.
Once upon a time, TV producers were journalists and played an important part in righting miscarriages of justice.
The BBC’s Rough Justice, Channel 4’s Trial and Error and Granada’s World In Action worked with justice organisations and campaign groups to release the innocent and those whose conviction was unsafe as a result of prosecutorial misconduct.
Such investigative reporting played a role in the setting up of the 1991 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice and the creation in 1997 of the CCRC.
Its HQ in Birmingham has perhaps unintended significance given it was the location of one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice when the IRA bombed two pubs and six men were wrongly convicted for it a year later in 1975.
A Granada TV investigation by Chris Mullen, which he continued as a Labour MP, was crucial to the release of the Birmingham Six in 1991 and their eventual compensation ten years later - something not available to Malkinson.
Yesterday the European Court Human Rights pronounced on the matter of compensation for miscarriage of justice victims, which may give Keir Starmer, apparently a human rights lawyer, reason to revisit the issue after next month’s general election.
Over in mainstream TV land, the last two decades have seen a steady dumbing down of current affairs and factual strands across terrestrial channels.
Miscarriages of justice are no longer cool and most of those making and commissioning programmes are no longer capable of investigating one.
Paradoxically, there has been a rise of true crime commissioning with independent TV companies who have little or no experience in this complex field desperate to cash in, as a recent Upsetter article revealed.
And so to Mindhouse, a production company set up in 2019 by Louis Theroux and his wife Nancy Strang, after years at the BBC.
Unlike the film makers behind the Malkinson documentary, Mindhouse had racked up no self-financed hours covering the Bamber case when Sky Crime handed out a lucrative commission to make a three-part series.
It was January 2020 and Bamber had just turned 59. He’d been inside for almost 34 years protesting his innocence.
In a disturbing act of political intervention, his original sentence of life with a 25-year minimum was secretly extended in 1988 by then Tory Home Secretary Douglas Hurd to a whole life tariff.
Bamber only found out over Christmas in 1994 that he was going to die in prison unless the Court of Appeal overturned his conviction.
His third attempt to persuade the CCRC, who alone have the power to refer cases to the Appeal Court, was being prepared when Mindhouse sent its pitch asking Bamber to open up his heart, mind and case files.
The TV company hoped to bag the first prison interview with the convicted mass murderer.
The case was back in the news as ITV had just broadcast a major drama, which largely adopted the prosecution case against Bamber.
Mindhouse used this in their initial attempt to get his buy in. The “one-sided” ITV drama might at least “increase interest in the case” and enable Theroux “to tell the other side” not in a “sensationalist, gratuitous, tabloid-style” but “forensically”, the email said.
When Louis approached Jeremy, the inmate was hopeful his innocence could be established with some further digging by the CCRC into the Essex police investigation.
Essex is a feeder force for the Met whose corruption has never been properly probed since the beginning of the drug war in the 1980s.
Understandably, Bamber, his lawyer and the campaign group jumped at the chance to collaborate with Mindhouse, whose promises were persuasive.
But within a year the relationship irreparably broke down amid allegations of false assurances, one-sidedness and an unethical attempt to ridicule a key campaign member.
Armed with internal correspondence between Bamber, Mindhouse and Sky, The Upsetter looks into the lens and raises a quizzical eyebrow Theroux-style to reveal the inside story of how dealing with Mindhouse became a mind fuck.
It’s not pretty. It’s the weird world of true crime TV.