A stitch-up which even Kigali would be ashamed of

 There is a lot to criticise in the way A Killing in Tiger Bay was presented. The intrusive, portentous music, the repetitions and the gimmicky way in which the testimony of the main protagonists was produced had me shouting "get on with it!" at the telly. It was a two-hour series, or maybe even a three half-hour series, of programmes stretched to three hours. For all that, even those who had followed news of the investigation of Lynette White's murder must have been shocked at some of the revelations, and those who came new to the case must have been devastated. Five young men, who were guilty only of petty crime and being non-white, were blatantly framed for a murder which early, admittedly scant, evidence clearly showed was committed by a single unknown white male. One accused and four "witnesses" had been harassed and coerced into giving false evidence, against not only the spirit but also the mandated practice of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. 

The lives of five young men, even of the two who were found not guilty, were permanently blighted and those of several family members cut short by the effect of the longest-running criminal trial in England and Wales. On top of that, even after the perversion of justice had been exposed by the legal appeal - only obtained by persistent campaigning by family and friends of the accused - the police officers concerned, named by the TV programme, were not convicted of any offence. Finally, a shadow of guilt ("no smoke without fire") was only finally removed by the use of DNA matching and thus identification of the real killer.

Three other unsatisfactory murder investigations by South Wales Police come to mind. In 1985, two men were wrongly convicted of the murder of the manager of a sex-shop in Swansea. Closer to home, the court threw out charges against a man accused of a murder in Skewen in 2008. Between those two came the case of Dai Morris, who was convicted of the Clydach murders in 1999 and who recently died in prison. Whether he was or was not responsible, the dubious use of character evidence in the trial may have significantly swayed the jury. We are promised a TV documentary on this case, possibly looking at new evidence, later in the year. Given the revelations of A Killing in Tiger Bay, one cannot take the verdict of the programme-makers for granted.

We are assured by the current Chief Constable, and his predecessor, speaking at the end of A Killing in Tiger Bay, that South Wales Police are totally reformed.