In an exclusive interview, Michael Mansfield KC also warned racism still permeates British policing and said the entire justice system had “dismally” failed postmasters in the Horizon scandal.
The self-described “radical lawyer” grew up in Finchley, attended Highgate School and later lived in Hampstead.
He has worked on many of Britain’s most controversial cases, including the murders of Jill Dando and Stephen Lawrence, the Michael Barrymore case, Princess Diana’s inquest, the Grenfell and Hillsborough inquiries, and the police shooting of Mark Duggan.
Now largely retired from criminal work and living in Warwickshire, he travelled to London last week for an event in Parliament marking 50 years since the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six, who were falsely accused of being IRA bombers.
“The need for being alert and aware of the risks of a miscarriage of justice is as great as it’s ever been,” he told Newsquest.
“I think the risk of some police officers constructing a case against the usual suspects is still going on.
“There is a culture amongst some police that some areas of the community are more liable to commit crime than others.”
Once it was the Irish, he said, but ethnic and religious minorities are now most commonly the victims.
He pointed to racist and misogynistic messages that officers from Charing Cross Police Station were revealed in 2022 to have sent each other.
One officer told a female colleague he would “happily rape” her. Others were caught trading offensive messages about African people, Muslims, disabled children and the Holocaust.
“It’s pretty shocking behaviour,” said Mr Mansfield. “Although there has been a shift in my lifetime… I think the culture is insidious. It creeps underneath what’s going on.”
Following an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct into the case, the Met Police accepted 15 recommendations and vowed to “drive forward lasting change”.
Michael Mansfield, in London for an appearance at the Houses of Parliament, spoke to Newsquest about AI, racist police officers and the CCRC (Image: Charles Thomson) In the 1970s, Mr Mansfield said, police would beat suspects into signing false confessions.
In cases like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, innocent people were dangled from police station windows, had their heads banged against cell walls and even had guns pointed at them.
When police were required to start recording all their interviews, the number of suspects who confessed to crimes collapsed – but the proportion allegedly made in police cars, where they were not being recorded, skyrocketed.
“It’s interesting how it all changed,” he said. “Suddenly, what? People don’t confess anymore? No. It’s that the confessions were never very satisfactory in the first place.”
But while coerced confessions may be largely consigned to history, he said, new problems are on the horizon.
“What worries me at the moment is AI – artificial intelligence – and the impact that’s going to have on the criminal system in terms of judging what is fake and what is true,” he cautioned.
He worries not only about AI potentially generating fake evidence, but also being deployed as an investigative tool.
The Post Office Horizon scandal perfectly exemplified the dangers of relying on technology, he said. Because computers said money was missing, everybody assumed it really was.
Few in the system – whether lawyers or judges – asked the most fundamental question: “Where is the money?”
“The system failed dismally on that one, it seems to me,” he said. “Nobody spotted it.
“The system has to recognise the possibility for mistake and fault and worse, and has to have a system in place which detects that going wrong.”
But that has now become mired in scandal. Just last month, Newsquest used the Freedom of Information Act to show it was so under-resourced that staff caseloads had doubled.
“The whole point of [the CCRC] was that that wouldn’t happen,” he lamented.
“What was going wrong at that time was there was nobody with sufficient time, sufficient resources, sufficient initiative, who could look at what’s now become known as a miscarriage of justice.”
He even made a promotional video for the CCRC when it launched.
“I thought it was going to be a brilliant innovation,” he said.
“But I think over the course of time, unfortunately, they’ve kind of either run out of steam or run out of resources or run out of initiatives.”
Another thing he feels has not helped the body is recruiting lots of ex-police officers.
“That meant there was a certain establishment skew on it all,” he suggested.
Despite all that has emerged over the decades – all the scandals and misconduct he and others have exposed – he said the system still has “an inbuilt, status quo state of mind”.
“If the establishment says X has happened, then you’ve got quite a job to show that it hasn’t happened,” he sighed.
Nothing will change until the system adopts “a healthier frame of mind”.
The CCRC previously said its team “remains focused on finding, investigating and sending potential miscarriages of justice back to the courts”.
*The full interview will be released in a podcast later this year.
