John Bartlett

The day my life changed forever

So… in just a few days time it’ll be my anniversary.  8th Feb 1993, twenty years ago, a corrupted seed, planted with impunity by the system I’d trusted, began to grow.  The events of that day, nurtured by influence, would develop into a trial; a trial that would end up defining me, changing my life and my beliefs forever.  I’d grown up believing in our justice system, trusting our police force was only a force for good.  Until that day, I had never considered how the often self-serving aspirations of the powerful could conflict with that popular belief.  As I was to discover, every now and then, objectives may be at odds with people of influence.

Over the coming months I plan to post information and documentation that our police and justice system would prefer remained hidden from public scrutiny.  Some may choose to dismiss this blog as a fiction. After all, my books, Dark Horse and Chequered Justice, on which my true story is based, were officially published as such.  But in that regard I had little control… I’d been warned:  either publish as fiction or don’t publish at all. This blog however is somewhat different; I won’t be publishing carefully phrased prose or conjecture …nothing I can’t verify 100%.  My purpose is straightforward… to demonstrate how our justice system sometimes convicts the innocent, and having done so in full knowledge a conviction may be unsafe, places its awesome resources behind concealing that fact…  Yesterday was my birthday, I’m now 58 years old and fully aware, twenty years on, that my case will now never be overturned, but awareness of what our system legitimately does, in the name of justice, could be the first stage towards creating a change for others.

Some of you may consider me biased; after all, incidents we have lived through can prejudice our perceptions, distorting them… but consider this; if what I say is true, what happened to me could, in some form or another, so easily happen to you.  The scary thing is it does happen, and far more often than you’ll ever believe.  With a prison population in the UK of well over 80,000, if our conviction rate was 99% accurate, we have at least 800 innocent people locked away for crimes they didn’t commit… and the generally accepted figure is in fact nearer to 4%.  i.e. 3,200 wrongly imprisoned!

Link to Motivating Force Page

Next post:  Setting the Scene

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