A former police officer claiming to be wrongly convicted of an assault that took place at a police station has accused the Criminal Cases Review Commission of ‘delaying action for years’ despite a review by a neighbouring force finding his case to be a miscarriage of justice a decade ago. Former police constable Danny Major claims to have been fitted up by his own colleagues following a vicious assault on a drunk 18 year old that took place in Leeds Bridewell Custody suite in the early hours of the morning in September, 2003.

In a letter to the CCRC’s shared with the Justice Gap, Danny Major argues that the watchdog is ‘not fit for purpose’ and complains of ‘a persistent lack of professionalism, basic competence, and disregard for applicants’ going back 17 years. The former police officer was sentenced to 15 months for assault, serving four months in prison, after being found guilty in 2006.

He first applied to the CCRC in 2007 and his case was rejected in 2010. As reported on the Justice Gap, the Greater Manchester Police conducted a review, Operation Lamp, which in 2015 concluded that a miscarriage of justice had indeed occurred and was critical of the CCRC for failing to interview witnesses. ‘The report vindicates Danny Major and what he has been saying for 12 years,’ Ian Hanson, chairman of the Greater Manchester Police Federation, told the Justice Gap at the time. The previous year, in May 2014, BBC Radio 4’s File on Four asked the CCRC’s then chair Richard Foster why the body had not commissioned a police force to investigate. ‘I stand by that judgement and if that investigation turns up anything new and it’s put to us, we would of course look at it,’ Foster said.

• You can read an interview with Danny Major by Jon Robins from 2015 here. His case features in Jon Robins’ book Guilty Until Proven Innocent (Biteback 2018).

In the letter addressed to the CCRC’s chief executive embattled chief exec Karen Kneller, Major accuses the CCRC of having ‘backed me into a corner’. ‘I no longer have confidence in your ability to act in the best interests of justice,’ he writes; adding that he was making his correspondence public with the intention of ‘compelling you to take immediate and necessary action’. ‘I have also engaged the Justice Secretary with the aim of implementing emergency measures that would bypass your organisation,’ he says.

As a result of Operation Lamp, the Crown Prosecution Service is currently considering charges against a number of Major’s colleagues. ‘However, despite this, the CCRC has failed to take any meaningful action, delaying justice for years,’ Major says. ‘The CCRC has recently admitted that the decision on whether to refer my case was made in August 2024 – yet they are refusing to disclose that decision to me.’

The former police officer cites the inaction of the watchdog over cases such as Andrew Malkinson case. ‘It is increasingly evident that the process designed to investigate miscarriages of justice and uphold confidence in the integrity of the British justice system actually exacerbates the injustice it was designed to investigate, the system is failing catastrophically,’ he continued. ‘The CCRC is no longer fit for purpose and must be dismantled. People have died in prison who should never have been there. Many others continue to live and die with their names unjustly tarnished – reliant on a disorganised and dysfunctional body that has repeatedly demonstrated its incompetence.’

Danny Major is critical of the then chair Richard Foster for failing to attend a 2017 meeting with MP Mary Creagh, as well as officers from Operation Redhill currently looking into the case for a criminal investigation to explain ‘not only why the CCRC had mishandled the first review but also why it was not referring the case immediately’. According to Major, Foster failed to attend ‘without notice or explanation’.

Danny Major has always flagged up the fact that the victim, Sean Rimmington, was assaulted in a modern police station fitted out with multiple CCTV cameras. ‘There were so many cameras in the Bridewell,’ Major told the Justice Gap in 2015. ‘All on the same system but, apparently, none were working. Five tape machines should’ve been running, but only two tapes were ever seized – all the others were broken or not recording.’ According to Major, an alarm would sound when the tapes needed changing. ‘It was not possible not to have the tapes recording. The system was set up for that not to happen,’ he says. ‘It’s quite clear what was happening.’

Operation Lamp revealed the lead investigator failed to recover four of six VHS video tapes; and on the two tapes that were recovered, eight hours of footage on each tape was edited to 90 minutes ‘which excluded evidence that undermined the prosecution and would have assisted the defence’. As the report notes, the edited versions were disclosed to the defence ‘and purported that they represented all of the CCTV evidence that was available’.