The
Appeal Court has finally quashed the deeply unsafe conviction of Erkin
Guney, jailed for 14 years for possessing a gun and supplying heroin. But
the appeal judges declined to tell the 38-year-old why he has been wrongly
incarcerated for seven years and why the court has now overturned his
conviction.
Guney has always maintained that he was set up by a business rival in
collusion with bent police, when officers acting on “intelligence” raided
his house and found a handgun and ammunition in one bedroom and five bags
of heroin worth £750,000 in another.
Last Friday Lord Justice Kennedy said that “doubt has been cast upon the
integrity of persons who were then (but are no longer) police officers,
and who played an important part in gathering intelligence”. But he said
no more. There was, he said, a balance to be struck between a duty to
inform Mr Guney of what had happened and a need to protect others “who
might be endangered if more were said”.
Guney’s appeal must have been one of the shortest on record. The Crown
Prosecution Service
(CPS) had already thrown in the towel, admitting that
“new sensitive material” completely undermined its case so “no sensible
argument could be mounted to maintain the safety of this conviction”. Thus
there was no discussion of the case in open court.
Eye
readers will recall that it was
secret “sensitive” material withheld from Guney’s defence team and from
the jury that played a major part in his wrongful conviction in the first
place. The crown used public interest immunity certificates to conceal
evidence believed to relate, among other things, to police and their
informants.
But while PII certificates protected prosecution material in the case,
loopholes in the evidence it presented gave weight to Guney’s claims of
innocence. There was no fingerprint or DNA evidence linking him to the
drugs, gun or ammunition; there was no proof he’d ever profited from drug
dealing, so no confiscation order was made on any of his assets; no drug
paraphernalia was ever found on his property; the cling film wrapping the
handgun was different to that found in the house.
A
serving police officer, aware that Guney had had difficulties with rival
businessmen, gave evidence on his behalf, saying that he believed Guney
had been stitched up. Further concerns about a possible miscarriage of
justice were raised when tape-recordings came to light supposedly of
detectives offering to “scupper” Guney’s trial in return for £50,000 from
Guney’s millionaire father, Ramadan Guney, the Turkish Cypriot businessman
who stood bail for disgraced Polly Peck tycoon Asil Nadir.
Although the Met’s anti-corruption unit investigated the tapes, Knacker of
the Yard concluded there was insufficient evidence for a prosecution.
Guney’s case was sent to the appeal court for consideration last summer by
the
Criminal Cases Review Commission. It was deeply concerned but said it
could not give too many details away because they were too “sensitive”. On
Friday the Court of Appeal did the same thing.
Tim Greene, Guney’s
solicitor said: “The court decided to protect the police, rather than tell
Mr Guney why he spent seven years in jail for something he didn't do.”
