UK: DPP overruled on Alton Manning
01 June 2000
In a landmark ruling the Lord Chief Justice, Lord gingham, set aside a decision by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) not to take criminal proceedings against any of the prison officers involved in the restraint-related death of black remand prisoner Alton Manning at Blakenhurst prison, Worcestershire, in December 1995. Alton collapsed and died at the private prison after he was taken to a cell, stripped naked and forced to squat to be searched for drugs. He was then forcibly carried semi-naked by six or seven prison officers who apparently used a neckhold that prevented him from breathing. Two pathologist's reports confirmed that he had died as a result of pressure to his neck leading to asphyxia, and an inquest jury returned a unanimous verdict of unlawful killing in March 1998.
HMP Blakenhurst was a contracted out prison run by UK Detention Services, which is jointly owned by the American company Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), at the time of Alton's killing. In the US the Corporation's private prisons have been described as a "private hell" by Christian Parenti in her book Lockdown America, which documents the "horrors and absurdities" of militarised policing and profitmaking prisons. Alton's death was the first restraint death in a private prison in the UK and one of three restraint deaths between October and December 1995 (the other two deaths were of Kenneth Severin at HMP Belmarsh on 25 November and Dennis Stevens at HMP Dartmoor on 18 October, see Statewatch vol 6 no 1).
The Lord Chief Justice's finding, that the DPP's decision not to prosecute any of the prison officers involved in Alton's death is unsustainable, follows a five-year campaign by family members, supported by the campaigning group INQUEST. In his ruling gingham found "serious questions arising" from the fact that the available evidence on the neckhold had not been addressed; that the decision not to prosecute any prison officer was "ultimately based on a hypothesis untenable on the available evidence" and that a DPP press release announcing the decision not to prosecute the prison officers "did not accurately reflect the true basis of the decision."
The solicitor acting for Alton's family, Raju Bhatt, said:
"What we see, in this case as in previous cases, is an institutionalised inability or unwillingness on the part of the DPP and the CPS to uphold the rule of law when those appointed to enforce the law are alleged to have abused their powers. And we see this very same weakness mirrored in the flawed and inadequate investigations of such allegations, as in the complacency of our political masters when confronted with the extent and depth of such a problem."
INQUEST, Ground Floor, Alexandra National House, 330 Seven Sisters Road, London N4 2PJ. Tel. 0208 802 7430, Fax 0208 802 7450; Christine Parenti "Lockdown America: police and prisons in the age of crisis" (Verve, London & New York) 1999, pp221-225; "Briefing: the death in prison of Alton Manning 1995" INQUEST 1998