Pastrick Maguire

AN artist wrongly convicted of helping make IRA bombs – who was jailed in an adult prison aged 13 more than 50 years ago – is backing a campaign for urgent reform to protect the next generation of miscarriage of justice victims.

Patrick Maguire – the youngest of a Kilburn family that became known as the “Maguire 7” – spoke to the New Journal this week on the urgent need to scrap legislation preventing innocent people from winning compensation claims.

The 64-year-old has spent decades supporting others like him whose lives have been devastated by scandalous failures of the British criminal justice system.

One of his paint­ings has been chosen as the image to front a new campaign launched by leading charities, Appeal and Justice, in the House of Commons on Tuesday.

Mr Maguire said: “This campaign has never been simply about money. But what the govern­ment has done is make it so. It’s so clear that this is not right, anyone can see it – it needs to be changed, we need to protect the next generation.”

In 2014, the Conservative government brought in legislation that forced anyone whose criminal convictions were quashed in the Court of Appeal to pass a second legal test for compensation.

The test meant people no longer considered guilty in the eyes of the law still had to prove, in a second legal hurdle, their innocence beyond reasonable doubt.

In a stroke, the change removed a fundamental pillar of the centuries-old British judicial system: you are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law.

Mr Maguire compared completing the arduous journey of overturning a convic­tion, and then being told you are still consid­ered guilty in terms of compensation, to scal­ing the world’s highest peak before being told “actually that’s Mount Everest way over there”.

He said: “They say, ‘Yeah there’s a bag of money here waiting for you. But you got to climb that mountain over there now.’ It really is a kick in the bollocks.”

The campaign to free Sam Hallam, a teenager wrongly convicted of murder

The government and the courts – here and in Europe – have so far rejected all challenges to scrap the test despite the opinions of some high-profile justices.

In a Commons committee room on Tuesday, miscarriage of justice victims – including Hoxton’s Sam Hallam and the Post Office scandal’s Seema Misra – joined forces with a series of MPs, Lords and top-ranking barristers including Belsize Park’s Helena Kennedy KC.

Conservative MP David Davis said the “presump­tion of innocence has been destroyed” by legislation that he said his own party had introduced due to pressure from the Treasury to save money, but he added: “I really do believe that this is an eminently winnable campaign.”

Mr Maguire, unlike other victims at the meeting, did get a payout due to his conviction being quashed 20 years before the rule changes came in – money that was spent mostly on getting mental health help at the Priory.

He also received an official “apology” from then prime minister Tony Blair.

Mr Maguire said: “I met Blair for the apology and I said to him, the way you should think about this is how would you feel if it was your kid? I had a book about our case, Trial and Error, with me – and I asked him to sign it. And he did, ‘sorry it took so long’. It sounded like a pizza man turning up with a cold pizza, saying ‘sorry it took so long’.

“The apology and compensation did nothing for me personally – it might as well have been a toaster and a kettle. But what it does help with is the public who are look­ing in, it helps them believe that you are innocent. And many don’t. That gives you a huge boost.”

Mr Maguire has had a special connection with Mr Hallam and played a big role in the campaign to free the young man from Hoxton who was jailed for eight years before his murder convic­tion was overturned – cruelly just as the new legal test for compen­­sa­tion came into effect.

He visited him in prison and made a painting for him that was sold at auction at the London Irish Centre to raise money for the long-running campaign – that piece is fronting the national cam­paign launched this week.

Our sister paper, the Islington Tribune, tracked the campaign to free Sam from day one, with reporters visiting him in prison – memorably with his mother on his 21st birthday.

And we were in the Court of Appeal to cover his sensational release.

Our front page story is included in a film created for the new campaign for compensa­tion justice.

But like Mr Maguire, Mr Hallam has struggled since that happy day due to a lack of support from the state – something a payout could have helped with.

The New Journal also reported on Mr Maguire’s first art exhibition in 2009, at the Kingsgate Gallery in West Hampstead. “That was the first time I did the barcode thing,” he recalled.

“Bars and numbers – that’s all prison really is. The numbers in the painting have a special connection to the person I’ve done it for. With Sam, the barcode sequence is his date of birth, the next six is the date he was arrested, then his prison number, then I think it’s the date when the case was approved for review. And the last one, 22, is his age at the time. It went for a couple of grand – I should have done a few more!”

He added: “I think I connected with Sam because I know what he has been through. When you get arrested, whatever life you have created at the time, it all gets blown up, the pieces get thrown up in the air, and not all of them bits come down again. It stays with you for your whole life.”

Sam Hallam with Patrick Maguire at parliament this week

He added: “I’ve lived with murderers, eaten my food with them [in prison]. I tell you, after a while you get to know, just by looking in their eyes, who is innocent. Look Sam in the eyes and you just know, trust me.”

The idea of the Appeal and Justice campaign is for famous names to hold up Mr Maguire’s artwork to help build momentum and heap pressure on Sir Keir Starmer’s govern­ment.

A string of celeb­rities are already lining up wanting to get involved. Mr Maguire spoke about how unsettling it was for him and his fellow miscarriage of justice victims to “drag it all back up” at the launch.

He said he wondered “where in the building politicians decided to move” against his family in 1974.

He spoke about the impact on his own life, over decades, but also on his family, including his youngest son, Sonny.

He has started asking questions about what happened to his old man all those years ago.

He said: “We had never told him anything about it all, but then he kept coming across bits here and there, on the internet. Like, he’d see stuff about me and my art in the New Journal. And then all of sudden we thought we’ve got to start telling him. It really concerned me, because no young kid should have their head filled up with this.

“He took it well. He asked stuff like whether I was crying, things like that. But then he started taking the piss… I remember he came into the room once and read out my prison number, and said ‘do you want a cup of tea?’ But suddenly all this Irish roots stuff is taking off in his head. I never knew anything about that growing up, we were Londoners – but I knew we had family in Belfast.

“Back then I was just going to Quintin Kynas­ton secondary school [now St John’s Wood Harris Academy] reluc­tantly. I had my Chopper bike. I was helping my mum with her five clean­ing jobs be­fore school. All I wan­ted to do was get home to my cartoons, watching them and draw­ing my own, copying characters from the Beano and stuff like that. I liked little figures, toy motorcars and I was a good foot­baller – I represented Lon­don at one point. I loved being a kid. But that was all ripped away from me. The day I was arrested was when my childhood ended.

Victims of miscarriages of justice and campaigners call for a fair compensation process

“And now my son – he’s the same age as I was when I got arrested – he knows about Sam Hallam because of what happened to me. Just this week I have to tell him I’m going to the House of Commons because the good guys who are in charge of this country are doing all this bad stuff, behaving terribly, and this is how it goes down here, you know. That’s what matters to me. Can you imagine what it’s like for a young lad at that age to hear that from their old man? But he is such a great kid, I love him to bits.”

Mr Maguire – who made artistic drawings in prison as a way of getting through the ordeal – has held many exhibitions and is still making art.

But he is currently without a studio and hoping to find someone with a nice light-filled room he can use to complete his projects.

He said: “I’ve had 30 years of doing art now and I’ve got loads of ideas and projects I want to finish. I’ve got an exhib­ition in my head I want to do. I just ain’t got the space to get it sorted – and I was hoping some­one might be able to help.”

Mr Davis spoke about the campaign at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday (Wednesday).

Responding, Keir Starmer said: “He raises a really important issue that I am obviously aware of. It is right that victims of miscarriage can apply for compensa­tion and appropriately do so, and I’ll take away what he says and have it looked at.”