Jeremy Bamber to remain in jail after appeal bid fails

Bamber’s spokesman – the former MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter – said that Bamber was called to the Governor’s office in HMP Full Sutton at York at 10.30am, where he was informed of the decision.

Bamber’s legal team told Channel 4 News that he is “shocked and profoundly disappointed” by the news but had vowed to continue attempting to clear his name.

They added that Bamber was in possession of more evidence which could be used to launch a bid for another appeal.

At the end of last month, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) reached an “in principle” decision over whether to refer Bamber’s conviction back to the Court of Appeal, but would not inform anyone – including Bamber himself – of what decision it had reached until it could go into the detail.

CCRC statement

The Criminal Cases Review Commission has today informed Jeremy Bamber that it has reached a provisional decision not to refer his murder convictions to the Court of Appeal. Mr Bamber and his legal team have been sent a Provisional Statement of Reasons. This is an 89-page document setting out in detail the Commission’s analysis of the case and the reasons for the provisional decision.

As is usual with Commission cases reaching this stage, Mr Bamber and his team have been invited to respond to the Commission’s case analysis and the reasons for its provisional decision. Given the lengthy and highly complex nature of the case, we have given Mr Bamber and his team three months in which to respond to our provisional decision (usually the period for a case of this type is 40 working days).

The Commission will then consider whatever representations it receives from Mr Bamber and his team before making a final decision on whether or not to refer the case for a fresh appeal hearing.

The Provisional Statement of Reasons expresses the Commission’s provisional conclusions on all the major points and arguments raised by Mr Bamber and his team during this and earlier reviews in relation to the safety of his 1985 murder convictions.

The Commission is now waiting for any further submissions from Mr Bamber before any final decision is made. It would therefore be inappropriate for us to comment further.

Bamber was bidding for a third appeal, having previously had two rejected in 1989 and 2002.

The judge at his trial described him as “warped and evil beyond belief”, and in concluding remarks made in the unsuccessful 2002 appeal, Lord Justice Kay said: “We do not doubt the safety of the verdicts and we have recorded in our judgment the fact that, the more we examined the detail of the case, the more likely we thought it to be that the jury were right.”

‘New evidence’

But Bamber and his legal team had uncovered a raft of documents and photographs which were not seen by the judges or jury at his original trial, nor in the subsequent appeals – evidence, they say, which proves he was not given a fair trial.

A Channel 4 News investigation exclusively revealed some of the previously-undisclosed pictures in January, which formed part of the Bamber legal team’s latest bid for an appeal.

Bamber, 50, was 24 when he was handed a sentence of life, and has always protested his innocence, claiming that his paranoid schizophrenic sister Sheila Caffell used a rifle to kill her adoptive parents and her twin sons before shooting herself.

“Finally to show the truth in open court would be fantastic, but that will never happen.” Jeremy Bamber

Last month, Bamber told Channel 4 News that he was attempting to force a retrial instead of having his conviction overturned.

“Finally to show the truth in open court would be fantastic but that will never happen,” he said.

Images

The newly-disclosed images, which Channel 4 News revealed last month, allegedly show the body of Bamber’s sister, Sheila Caffell, with the murder weapon – a rifle – positioned in different places on her body.

The defence team claims that such inconsistencies would point to evidence-tampering and would therefore be incompatible with the original prosecution’s case; that Bamber killed his family and then, crucially, restaged the scene to make it look like a murder/suicide.