Private Eye, issue 909, 18 October 1996, page 5
The quashing of the conviction against former army information officer Colin Wallace will come as no surprise to Eye readers, who have been reading about the case since issue 684 -- 4 March 1988.
In all the Eye has published 34 items about the Wallace affair, exposing his frame-up by MI5 when he refused to take part in its black propaganda against the Labour government of the mid-1970s, and his later frame-up by the Sussex police and the crown prosecution service (CPS) in the manslaughter case.
By the time the prosecution came to the court of appeal it had abandoned almost every detail of the intricate case it put at Lewes crown court in 1981. There was no blood from the dead man, Jonathan Lewis, in Wallace's car boot, as had been alleged at trial. So the body of the dead man had never been in the boot, as repeatedly alleged. Lewis had not been killed at Wallace's home, as originally pretended. He had not been unconscious for several hours, as was argued at the trial. And the formerly discredited witness who saw Lewis in a pub with another man on the evening of his death had probably been telling the truth.
Instead of apologising for the false conviction and the six-year prison sentence which flowed from all this nonsense, prosecution barrister Ann Curnow insisted Wallace was still guilty, and, when her case was trampled on by the judges, she demanded a retrial. The best way to find out what really happened to Jonathan Lewis, she submitted, was to try Wallace again. This was rejected by the judges, and Wallace will not be tried again.
Will the Sussex police now sulk and do nothing, as police forces usually do when their convictions are quashed? Or will they at least try to find out who attacked Jonathan Lewis? They could start by properly investigating some of the many statements they had at the time incriminating an unscrupulous gang of Brighton antique dealers and smugglers who, it was suggested at the time, had been harassing Lewis before his death. One solicitor told police that a client of his had told him Lewis had been “done” by “the Brighton gang”.