Thomas Ross QC: Remember William Beck

Thomas Ross QC

STV news recently reported that William Beck, aged 59, suffered a fatal heart attack on 20th May 2020 while with his family in Glasgow.

The name of William (known as ‘Wullie’) Beck will be familiar to all regular readers of the Scottish Criminal Case Reports. I first met him in 2019. By then almost 30 years had passed since his conviction in the High Court at Livingston and he had long since served the sentence of six years’ imprisonment; yet his commitment to set that conviction aside had not wavered.

In describing his determination I cannot improve upon the assessment of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (in 2012) “more importantly, to suggest that the applicant has refused to acquiesce in his conviction would be a serious understatement. He has protested his innocence consistently since his conviction. As well as pursuing an appeal following his conviction (despite the absence of legal assistance) he complained about the conduct of the identification parade post-trial … He applied a number of times to the office of the Secretary of State for Scotland to have his case referred to the High Court. He made a further attempt to open up an avenue of appeal by applying direct to the court in 2006 … He attempted to petition the nobile officium …. He has engaged the assistance of MSP’s and of the Innocence Project. He has applied to the SCCRC on three occasions … the breadth and persistence of the applicant’s conduct in pursuing his claims of miscarriage of justice is striking and is unlike any other applicant the Commission has encountered”.

Was Wullie Beck the victim of a miscarriage of justice? The indictment alleged the robbery of two post office workers during a cash collection at the Safeway in Livingston on 12th December 1981. There seems to have been little doubt that the robbery was committed by two men who were pursued on foot to a get-away car (a Ford Grenada stolen earlier that day in Glasgow) in which they made their escape. As put by the trial judge (Lord Dunpark) in his charge to the jury, although other civilians saw part of the incident, the case against William Beck ultimately rested upon identifications of William Beck made by two eye witnesses, A and M.

Cases based solely upon identification by eye witnesses have given British lawyers cause for concern for more than a hundred years. Ironically, a notorious miscarriage of justice almost a century earlier had involved a different Beck, Adolf Beck, convicted in 1896 at the Old Bailey. In 80 years the problem had not gone away and in 1974 the Home Secretary appointed a committee, chaired by Lord Devlin, to consider ‘the wrongful convictions of Mr Luke Dougherty and Mr Lazlo Virag’ – in both cases ‘wrongful’ because honest witnesses acting in good faith had simply identified people who had had absolutely no involvement in the relevant crime.

Scotland had of course experienced its own problems – the Bryden Report (1978) listed cases where Royal Pardons had followed Scottish convictions based upon erroneous identifications. In a country of only five million citizens no fewer than four Royal Pardons had been granted in a period of seven years. The list included the case of Maurice Swanson who had been convicted in the High Court in Glasgow on 28th August 1974 then pardoned on 25th July 1975. Swanson had been identified by three witnesses, two bank tellers and an independent female who had been standing at a nearby bus stop - yet was completely innocent of the crime.

Read the full article on the SLN website