Stuart Gair - Justice 'must be done' for the good of Scots law

The case of recently deceased Stuart Gair, a victim of a terrible injustice at the hands of Scotland's legal system which saw him jailed for a crime he did not commit, must not be let to rest until the injustice & corruption which ended his life is fully accounted for.

The Herald reports :

We owe it to this man to demand justice is done

EAMONN O'NEILL

Stuart Gair's death saved money, time and effort. His blood is on their hands On Tuesday last week, miscarriage-of-justice victim Stuart Gair, 44 years old, died within 15 minutes of his life-support system being switched off in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Three members of Glasgow's Miscarriages of Justice Organisation were present at the tragic scene.

On Friday, October 26, he'd suffered the first of three heart attacks before slipping into a coma. For 17 of the past 18 years he'd lived in a perpetual state of anxiety. His stress-induced condition developed because in August 1989 he was - as we now know and legal authorities accept - wrongfully convicted of a murder. Only in July 2006 was his conviction finally overturned.

He'd supposedly stabbed Stirlingshire man Peter Smith, who later died, in Glasgow in April 1989. The area was a well-known cruising spot for so-called "rent-boys" near the St Vincent Street public toilets and witnesses who identified Gair as the culprit who stabbed Mr Smith with a knife in a nearby lane, were all of one-voice in their certainty. The police who arrived on the scene shortly afterwards, as well as the detectives who investigated, seemed impressive when they came to give evidence in court in August that year. Clippings I looked at indicated few journalists bothered with the case at the time, probably - as one original juror now residing in Australia who contacted me recently explained - because it seemed an open-and-shut case, and after a hearing at the High Court in Ingram Street Gair was duly sentenced to life imprisonment.

But rumours surfaced that something was amiss. When I first heard of this case in 1992 while working at STV, source after source kept saying Gair - a petty criminal and drug addict also from Stirlingshire - had been wrongfully convicted. Between 1998 and 1999 I investigated the case. I was not the first journalist to do so: Bernard Ponsonby from STV and The Big Issue's Neil Mackay had gone down related paths prior to me, with important results.

For my part, I travelled hundreds of miles across the UK, tracing 90% of the witnesses. Astonishingly, all recanted their original evidence. Additionally, new analysis cast doubt upon the forensic evidence. An interview in 1999 with Gair inside Edinburgh's Saughton prison convinced me that something was far wrong with the safety of this conviction. But it took another seven years, until 2006, before the judicial system agreed and Gair was exonerated.

I was the sole journalist to accompany Stuart Gair to his appeal on a summer's morning in July 2006. Other journalists were understandably caught up in the colourful libel trial involving sex allegations against Tommy Sheridan in a nearby court.

But Gair's case also yielded drama: witness after witness alleged they'd been forced to perjure themselves in 1989; the detective in charge of the case admitted swiping all the case papers prior to his sudden retirement in 1999, before depositing them with his personal lawyer because he might have needed them for defence reasons and also for use in an autobiography; and there were startling admissions of invalid forensic pathology evidence dating back to 1989 relayed from expert Dr Marie Cassidy. The press however, sidestepped all this and only reported that Gair's conviction was overturned because of non-disclosure of vital evidence by the Crown to his defence. But by reporting this narrow - though vital - issue, it lessened portraying the overall catastrophic impression that anyone listening to the evidence felt was clearly on show.

Gair was cleared - he fled the court and promptly vomited in a nearby toilet. For 12 months he haunted Glasgow and then Edinburgh's streets. Mojo (the charity that supports miscarriage of justice victims) helped him with frozen meals and counselling and he started to pull himself together. I met him a month before his death and listened as he tearfully explained how he sometimes crawled out of bed to sleep on his carpet. His doctor - organised by Mojo - said it was "because it's the same size as your cell". It might have been nonsense but I thought it had a ring of truth.

Once, Scotland had few miscarriages of justice. No more. I could list the cases in this column, but I won't. Only the limited funding for Mojo by the Scottish Government is any cause for hope in this issue. This week it was revealed Sally Clark, also wrongfully-convicted, died from alcoholic poisoning. If Mojo had a well-funded retreat, she - and Stuart Gair - would have stood a chance. As it is, they're dead.

Someone, somewhere, smiled last week when Stuart Gair died. His death saved money, time and effort. His blood is on their hands.

Is this the world we want to live in? Is this the Scotland we want to live in? Or do we choose to define this country by asking tough questions and demanding those who framed him be brought to justice?

The Stuart Gair I knew wouldn't want to rest in peace.

Stuart Gair - a life taken by Scotland's culture of injustice.

Neil MacKay of the Sunday Herald reports on the tragedy of Stuart Gair, recently deceased, whose life was ruined by Scotland's Justice system, and those who ruined the late Mr Gair's life, still remain to be held to account for their terrible actions, bordering on the evil ...

The tragedy of Stuart Gair

A life ruined by 13 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. An addiction which scarred the precious freedom he finally won. And just as there was hope for the future ... a lonely and sudden death. BY NEIL MACKAY, WHO CAMPAIGNED FOR FIVE YEARS TO PROVE HIS INNOCENCE

THE LAST time I saw Stuart Gair alive was in a bar just off George Square in Glasgow. I'd spent the best part of the previous five years campaigning for his release from jail for a crime he didn't commit. He'd just been bailed from prison pending his appeal against a life sentence for murder.

It should have been a celebration, but Stuart was homeless and strung out on drugs. He was pale, thin and had trembling heroin sweats so bad that his shirt front was soaked through. He asked if he could crash at my house for a few days. He'd just been thrown out of the house of another friend and supporter - a prison doctor who had tirelessly campaigned on Stuart's behalf - because he'd been shooting up heroin while the doctor's children were about. I had kids too - two little girls aged under five. So, I had to turn my back on him, although he didn't show any anger or act as if he'd been betrayed.

It took until the summer of 2006 for the appeal court to finally clear Stuart's name of the murder of Peter Smith, a former soldier. Smith was stabbed to death in an alleyway in the city centre of Glasgow often used by rent boys.

I met key witnesses who had identified Stuart as the killer. They admitted to me that they perjured themselves following police intimidation. Prosecution witnesses who had placed Stuart at the scene of the crime told me that police officers had threatened to expose them as gay - the men were in the closet - unless they pointed the finger at Stuart.

I uncovered an alibi for Stuart's whereabouts at the time of the murder. Forensic evidence was proved to be fundamentally flawed. Even the family of Peter Smith told me that they had come to believe that Stuart was innocent. By 1999, I'd laid all that information out before the public in the pages of this newspaper. It took another seven years before the state recognised his innocence.

Just to make life difficult for Stuart and for an irritating reporter like me, the prison system repeatedly denied me the right to interview him while he was still inside. That's until the Sunday Herald threatened to sue, however. Then life became a lot easier. Before that, Stuart and I mostly had to rely on time-consuming letters, all of which I still have. I was reading them the other night. In person, he was diffident and conscious of his lack of formal education. In print, he was more free and confident, a well-read, amusing, intelligent man. If life had dealt him another hand, I'm sure he would have been a writer and a good one, at that.

In the intervening six years since I last saw him, the stories I heard about Stuart had a miserable inevitability to them. He kept getting arrested for heroin possession with intent to supply and drifted about from hostel to hostel, dossing where he could. He even took money from the bank account of his elderly disabled mum and stashed drugs to deal in her nursing home. And there was another tale about him giving booze to kids.

He'd spent 13 years as an innocent man behind bars, he'd got hooked on smack while in prison, and then when the system finally, grudgingly, decided that he might not be a killer after all, it threw him out on to the streets an angry, confused addict, without a penny in his pocket or a roof over his head.

Last Tuesday night, I got a phone call from John McManus, who runs the Miscarriage of Justice Organisation (Mojo) in Glasgow. On the previous Friday, Stuart suffered a minor heart attack. Alone at home in his flat in Leith, Stuart called 999 and waited for the ambulance.

IN a final irony, for a man who lived his life in the media glare, the paramedics who arrived had a camera crew in tow. TV investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre was making a film about the emergency services. Stuart recognised the reporter and started telling him about his life. Not long into the conversation, Stuart's head rocked backwards as he suffered the first of a series of massive cardiac arrests which starved his body of oxygen. By the time the medics got him to hospital, he was effectively brain dead.

Machines kept Stuart alive until Tuesday, when doctors at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary eventually tracked down his friends, McManus and Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six. Hill- who spent 16 years in jail for IRA atrocities that he did not commit - now lives in Beith with his family, but still bears the mental scars of what he went through.

They stayed with Stuart while doctors switched off the machines. Ian Stephen, the acclaimed Scottish psychologist and a prominent member of Mojo, was also there.

On Wednesday, I travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh with Stuart's friends. John from Mojo was there, along with his colleague Cathy Molloy, and Hill was driving. They needed to go through things at this flat; look for important documents. They needed to do simple things too, like empty his fridge, cancel the phone and gas. They needed to tie up the loose ends of his life.

While we drove from city to city, they told me about the last two years of Stuart's life and how he'd turned the corner. After his final spell in jail for heroin, he'd stayed clean. He'd even managed to kick the horribly-addictive medically-prescribed heroin substitute methadone last Christmas.

This was a man who'd somehow rediscovered his lust for life. He'd got a flat, he was writing, eating well, swimming, hill-walking, chasing women and falling in love. Somewhere, just over the horizon, lay the promise of at least a £1 million pay-out from the state for wrongful conviction. One moment, he was thinking about moving to the country, the next of living the life of a well-heeled urbanite .

The front door of Stuart's flat has multiple locks - a hangover from prison that many victims of miscarriage of justice suffer from; they need the security of the locked door before they can sleep at night. The flat was neat and tidy, smelling faintly of soap and aftershave.

By his bed-side was a little bag with a tiny amount of hash inside. Beside it, was a book on Buddhism, some joss sticks and candles. Cathy started looking for his papers. She and Stuart were close, like a brother and sister, and he'd told her his entire life could be found in a little brown washbag. Cathy broke down when she found it. Inside, there were pictures of his mum - who is now dead - and his birth certificate with the father's name left blank.

Some CDs by Amy Macdonald, Damien Rice, Johnny Cash, Moby and Joni Mitchell were at his bedside too.

A little while later, Stuart's girlfriend Mairi arrived. She asked for her second name not to be used in any article. She cried in Cathy's arms and then crumpled to the living room floor as John tried to explain what had happened. She'd only found out that her lover had died that morning - a day after his death - when a friend read a small report in the local paper. Mairi had been at her parents' home in Fife, and because of the problems the doctors had finding next of kin, no-one had contacted her.

"I can't bear to think of him all alone in that hospital, dying by himself, when I could have been with him," she said over and over again, in a low, keening voice. She and Cathy hugged again. Then they talked, and Mairi spoke of Stuart's 17-year-old daughter. Everyone in that room thought that she had died years ago as a young child. But apparently, she was alive and well and growing into a young woman somewhere in Scotland.

Who knows why Stuart only spoke of her to Mairi. He was a man who liked secrets. Mojo staff hope they can find her by the end of next week when Stuart will be cremated and his ashes scattered over Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh where he loved to walk with Mairi. He has few other living relatives.

FATE had it in for Stuart Gair. All his roles in life set him up for a sorry end. A little boy who never knew his dad; a teenage petty thief fitted up for murder; a jailbird junkie on a mission to self-destruct; and finally a man on the road to happiness with a misfiring heart in his chest that he knew nothing at all about.

Jim McGregor - the prison doctor who first contacted me to campaign on behalf of Stuart and then had to face what he calls the "horror story" of Stuart taking his drug problems into his home - says the state must accept its part in Stuart's death.

"I half expected one day to hear that Stuart had been found dead," he said. "The only lesson to be learned from his life is that the police and courts are corrupt and nothing has changed. No-one has had the balls to change the system which his case showed to be rotten.

"Everything remains the same, so more innocent people will end up going to prison, and more damaged individuals will end up coming out. And still - to this day - we do not know who killed Peter Smith. A killer is still on the streets. God knows how many others suffered at his hands."

Miscarriage of Justice victim Stuart Gair dies before compensation payout

Stuart Gair who was jailed in 1989 for murder died on Tuesday in Edinburgh just months before he was to receive compensation after the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction last year, citing yet another disclosure failure by the Crown Office, who failed to hand over witness statements to the late Mr Gair's solicitors.

The Scotsman reports :

Innocent man jailed for 12 years dies just months before £1m compensation

TANYA THOMPSON AND EAMONN O'NEILL

THE victim of one of Scotland's most shocking miscarriages of justice has died, months before he was to receive £1 million in compensation.

Stuart Gair, who was jailed in 1989 for murder, died yesterday at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary following a heart attack.

Mr Gair, 44, who spent 17 years protesting his innocence, was last year cleared by appeal judges who attacked a failure to disclose witness statements to his lawyers.

Jailed for life, he served 12 years but protested his innocence from day one. He was released in 2000 pending an appeal, but it took a further six years before his conviction was quashed at the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh in July last year. He insisted he had been the victim of a police frame-up.

Mr Gair, originally from Alloa, was cleared after it was ruled he had suffered a miscarriage of justice. In the judgment delivered by the Appeal Court, Lord Abernethy said it meant "the defence were deprived of a powerful argument on the crucial issue of identification".

John McManus, co-ordinator for Glasgow-based Mojo, the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, said he was with Mr Gair when he died.

He added: "This is a tragedy. Stuart had been waiting for compensation and the whole thing had put him under a lot of strain. He had suffered dreadfully, and had only just started to get some counselling."

In 1989 after a five-day trial at the High Court in Glasgow, Mr Gair was found guilty of murdering Peter Smith, a former soldier, who was stabbed in Glasgow city centre.

Mr Gair denied murder and put forward a defence of alibi, insisting he was in another part of Glasgow at the time. But he was convicted on a majority verdict.

He protested his innocence and campaigners rallied to his cause. Eventually, his case was sent to the Appeal Court by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Mr Gair had petitioned the Scottish Secretary over his case and was freed on bail in 2000. Identification was the key issue at the trial and lawyers acting for Mr Gair argued that, crucially, the Crown failed to disclose important information to his defence.

During the trial, a witness, Brian Morrison, who was 19 at the time, identified Mr Gair as a man he saw come out of public toilets and go in the direction of North Court Lane, where the attack happened.

In an initial statement, he said he would definitely be able to identify the two men he had seen and that one of them had threatened him.

But later, he told officers: "A lot of what I have already told the police is not the truth. I made up some of it to attract attention."

Mr Gair's defence counsel, Gordon Jackson, QC, argued that if this information had been available to his lawyers Mr Morrison could have been cross-examined in such a way as to show the jury they could not trust a word he said.

A note had been attached to Crown papers for the trial which said that at one point Mr Morrison had signed himself into a psychiatric hospital. It went on: "Morrison and his vivid imagination certainly set the police off on the trail of a red herring initially."

In the Appeal Court judgment, Lord Abernethy concluded: "In these circumstances, we have come to the conclusion that the non-disclosure of these police statements and other information resulted in a miscarriage of justice."

Sources close to Mr Gair said that, had he lived, he would have received about £1 million in compensation.