'I'm 90 per cent sure the wrong man was sent to his death'
Lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman died this month after a lifetime of taking on powerful bodies through the courts – he won most of his cases, but there's one in particular that he always felt had got away
Good evening everyone, here’s another NewJournal+ bonus feature – and it’s written in the wake of the death of Sir Geoffrey Bindman this month. His was a career of many successes, but there’s a case that he often thought of as the one that got away. Tom Foot, whose father, the investigating journalist Paul Foot was also convinced that a grave miscarriage of justice had been carried out, explains the obsession with the ‘A6 murder’.
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Now let’s get into Tom’s feature…
SIR Geoffrey Bindman spent more than six decades at the coalface of British justice, carving out a reputation as one of the country’s most principled and persistent human rights solicitors.
To his peers, he was a quiet legend – an advocate whose soft voice belied an ironclad commitment to social causes, and whose cases helped shape modern civil liberties law both here and abroad.
He lived and worked for almost all of his life in the borough of Camden, mainly on the Holly Lodge Estate and at High Point in Highgate, and over the decades he helped thousands of struggling clients get the defence they needed. Bindmans, the firm he founded in 1974, is now based in plush offices in Gray’s Inn Road, King’s Cross.
Tributes have followed Sir Geoffrey’s death at 92 this month from around the world and, last week, local politicians at Camden Town Hall praised his role in setting up the borough’s Community Law Centre – one of the first of its kind at the time. Sir Geoffrey had himself at one time been a councillor in this chamber.
But his focus was law rather than politics, and he wrote and lectured extensively on the ethical responsibilities of lawyers and the need for state transparency.
One question that animated him to the end remains unresolved: what does it mean to pursue justice in a system that sometimes gets it wrong?
Maybe that’s because beneath this meticulous legal mind ran a conviction that never left him: James Hanratty, hanged for the “A6 murder”, a man he believed had been wrongly condemned.
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