On Tuesday (6th), David Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice once again. In London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted! The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets. His spokesmen in the Home Office says it’s a completely “reasonable course of action” as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren’t in prison. The government calls it ‘Saved Living Expenses’.

Paddy Hill, of the Birmingham 6, spent 16 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. Paddy has now been presented with a bill for £50,000 for “living expenses” incurred while wrongly convicted. “The establishment hates me and people like me as we proved them wrong,” he said. “They either want to ignore us or hurt us.”

Vincent Hickey, one of the Bridgewater Four, wrongly convicted for killing a paperboy, was charged £60,000 for the 17 years he spent in jail. He said: “If I had known this I would have stayed on hunger-strike longer, that way I would have had a smaller bill.”


Blunkett’s fight has been described as “outrageous”, “morally repugnant” and the “sickest of sick jokes” from the Sunday Herald

Our shoddy treatment of victims of injustice from the Guardian