www.silverguide.site –

A few weeks ago I wrote a lengthy email to Jeremy Bamber, who has been in prison for nearly 41 years after being convicted of murdering five family members. Bamber has always protested his innocence, and the late Guardian prison correspondent Eric Allison and I have frequently written about Bamber and the White House Farm murders in the Guardian over the years.

In the email, I asked about aspects of his case as I often do, chatted about a football match I’d been to with my younger daughter at the weekend, told him my older daughter was pregnant, mentioned that I’d been out for lunch with a forensics expert, and said we had an amazing blossom tree across the road that had just come into full bloom. I also emailed a photo of the blossom tree.

I later heard from his campaign team that Bamber had not received the letter because HMP Wakefield had banned him from receiving mail and email from journalists. They did show him the photograph of the blossom tree, which apparently he appreciated. However, the campaign team said he was not allowed to email a response saying how much he liked the tree because he had also been banned from sending letters and emails to journalists. The campaign group says he is now banned from all forms of correspondence with the media.

Bamber has been writing to journalists since he was jailed in 1985. This is how we have learned about many of the inconsistencies, errors and failings in the initial investigation that make many of us believe his conviction is unsafe at the very least. It’s also how we’ve learned about crucial evidence that has been destroyed in the intervening years. So why would HMP Wakefield stop him now?

It’s hard to believe that it is unconnected to the coverage his case has received over the past couple of years. Many newspapers have examined specific pieces of evidence, concluding that he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice. In February, the Guardian published an article in which Prof Jason Payne-James, a specialist in forensic and legal medicine, said he believed that a silencer was not used when Bamber’s sister was killed.

The silencer had been key at Bamber’s trial. The jury was given two options – the five family members had been murdered by Bamber because he was desperate to inherit his parents’ money, or it was a murder-suicide by his sister Sheila Caffell who had killed her parents and her six-year-old twin sons before shooting herself. Caffell had recently been hospitalised with schizophrenia and feared that the twins might be fostered because her parents thought she was no longer capable of looking after them.

When the massacre was first covered in newspapers, it was reported as murder-suicide. Justice Maurice Drake, who presided over the 1986 trial, told the jury that if it was convinced a silencer had been used, then Bamber was the killer because Caffell’s arms weren’t long enough to shoot herself in the throat with the silencer attached.

Last year, the New Yorker broadcast a successful six-podcast series, Blood Relatives, questioning Bamber’s guilt. The series featured extensive interviews with him. This month the Sun ran an interview with Michael O’Brien, one of three men wrongly convicted of the 1987 killing of Cardiff newsagent Phillip Saunders, who spent time in jail with Bamber and is convinced he is innocent. O’Brien became a seminal figure in ensuring that prisoners who claimed they were wrongfully convicted had access to the media to make their case.

A number of high-profile convictions have been overturned at the court of appeal in recent years. In 2023, Andrew Malkinson was cleared after spending 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. In 2025, Peter Sullivan had his murder conviction quashed after spending 38 years in prison, which is believed to be the UK’s longest wrongful imprisonment.

Not surprisingly, these wrongful convictions have led journalists to focus on other potential miscarriages of justice. The most high profile of these cases are Bamber and Lucy Letby, who was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others. If either of these convictions were to be overturned, it would cast a huge shadow over whether the British justice system is fit for purpose. Of these two cases, the stakes are highest with Bamber because he has spent almost 41 years in prison.

The right of prisoners claiming a miscarriage of justice to contact the media, including by telephone and interview, was established in the UK through a 1999 case in which Ian Simms and O’Brien successfully argued that a “blanket ban” on journalists interviewing prisoners violated the prisoners’ rights to free speech and obstructed access to justice.

A ban imposed by Conservative home secretary Michael Howard and later by Labour home secretary Jack Straw, on journalists visiting prisoners and writing about their cases, was declared unlawful at the court of appeal. In the landmark judgment, the investigative journalist Bob Woffinden provided the court with details of more than 60 cases over the previous decade in which journalists played “a substantial role in identifying miscarriages of justice which led to the quashing of the convictions”. Lord Steyn, delivering the judgment, said: “In recent years a substantial number of miscarriages of justice have only been identified and corrected [through] painstaking investigation by journalists.”

Without giving the Guardian a specific explanation for the decision in Bamber’s case, the Prison Service said it does not issue blanket bans and cited “the need to protect victims from serious distress and maintain confidence in the justice system” as the basis for restrictions on communication. But the Simms and O’Brien ruling states that limitations on communications that are considered “necessary” and “proportionate” to protect the rights of others, including victims, must be justified individually. In Bamber’s case we have seen no such justification.

Depressingly, this clampdown on freedom of speech and access to justice is again happening under a Labour government. And as with the Blair administration, it is a cabinet loaded with former lawyers – Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, Richard Hermer and Sarah Sackman are all barristers. Both prime minister Starmer and attorney general Hermer are, rightly, proud of the way they championed human rights as lawyers.

The prime minister famously represented environmental activists Helen Steel and David Morris in the McLibel Two case, and co-edited the book Miscarriages of Justice: A Review of Justice in Error. Hermer has a distinguished record in representing miscarriages of justice (including the estate of Derek Bentley, who was posthumously pardoned in 1998 after being hanged in 1953).

And yet this is a government that has presided over HMP Wakefield denying Bamber the right to make the case that he is innocent. It is within the gift of Starmer (via the Ministry of Justice) to order the prison to lift the ban immediately – and to remind the MoJ of the vital right of prisoners who claim they have been wrongfully convicted to have access to the press. If he doesn’t, he may well be remembered for overseeing the abuse of human rights rather than championing them.

• Simon Hattenstone is a features writer for the Guardian

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.