'I was drunk', confesses witness in murder case

Three days after I published this story, protestors gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice, demanding Jason Moore’s murder sentence be quashed in light of the new evidence I had uncovered. The story was picked up by national titles like the Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Guardian and Private Eye. MPs and celebrities backed the Free Jason Moore campaign. The Bishop of Stepney protested outside Downing Street. My story is now at the heart of a new application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) to send Jason’s case back to the Court of Appeal.

I was approached by the campaigners in November 2021. What piqued my interest was that the Free Jason Moore campaign was jointly led by his own family and that of his alleged victim. The very people you’d expect to be fighting to keep Jason locked up were actually calling for his release, convinced he was innocent of the crime. Since then, I’ve scoured thousands of pages of interviews, statements, trial transcripts, exhibits. Jason was charged on the basis of a single eyewitness identifying him as the killer. No forensic evidence linked him to the crime. I re-interviewed witnesses and consulted experts. It became clear that the ID procedure which resulted in Jason’s murder charge was deeply flawed. The witness was inconsistent, had previously identified someone else as the killer and only picked Jason out having already been shown his photograph. Experts I interviewed suggested other factors in Jason’s case were a recipe for bad eyewitness evidence. As so much of what undermined Jason’s conviction hinged on the star witness’s credibility (or lack thereof), I had to find him and see if he would speak to me. I studied his every interview and statement, plus his trial testimony, so I’d arrive knowing the subject inside-out. My hope was that he would sit down with me and let me slowly take him through his various accounts, showing him how some of what he thought he remembered was disproved by evidence, like CCTV, and how the two men he had identified years apart as the killer bore no resemblance to one another. Maybe he’d agree that he shouldn’t have been relied upon. Maybe he’d persuade me he was right after all. Most likely, I thought, he’d just slam the door in my face. What I certainly never imagined was that he would start yelling at me that he had been “drunk” on the day in question, so how was he supposed to remember anything? I was so stunned, I pretended I hadn’t heard him properly and asked him to repeat himself. He said it again: he’d been drinking when he witnessed the fatal clash. Moreover, he insisted he had told this to the police. If true, there had been a catastrophic disclosure breach somewhere in the chain. No such information had ever been shared with the defence.