The Black refugee wrongly imprisoned for 13 years – now the fight for compensation
Only a handful of those wrongly jailed have received money from the government. As we tell Ahmed’s story, we ask why and what will be done? Reporting by Adam Bychawski
Ahmed Adan had always maintained his innocence, but justice moved painfully slowly. It took seventeen years – thirteen of which he spent in detention – before fresh DNA evidence led to his conviction being quashed.
When his name was finally cleared, Adan turned to the government for compensation. He knew no amount of money could ever make up for losing the prime years of his life – he was 17 when he was wrongly accused of indecent assault – but it could at least offer him a chance to move on.
“Ahmed was worried about the future he’d lost, but we were telling him you will get compensation,” says Mohamed Adan, Ahmed’s father. With it, he envisaged he would “start a new life”.
Despite the courts having ruled that he should never have been convicted, the then Justice Minister Brandon Lewis denied his claim.
Adan is far from alone. Only 39 out of 591 applicants to the Ministry of Justice’s compensation scheme for miscarriages of justice have been successful in the last eight years, according to government statistics.
The scheme is one of the few ways people who have successfully overturned their convictions in the courts can obtain compensation for being wrongly imprisoned.
Even getting to the position of applying to the scheme – under which the secretary of state has the ultimate decision over whether to grant compensation – is a battle.
Adan was wrongly convicted of two counts of indecent assault in 2004. The son of two Somali refugees, he had moved to the UK in July 2001 to live with his parents in Tooting, south London. He had significant mental health problems – doctors subsequently diagnosed him with early onset schizophrenia – and he rarely left the house without a member of his family.
One evening, just over a month after he arrived in the UK, Adan went missing. His parents feared for his safety and reported him missing to the police. Thankfully, he returned home hours later, explaining that he got lost after going to shops to buy cigarettes.
Weeks later, Adan was arrested on suspicion of having committed indecent assault. The same night Adan had gone missing, a woman reported that she was sexually assaulted by a man while walking home. Police said Adan matched her description of her attacker.
He was released on bail and then arrested again a week later after police alleged he had committed a further five indecent assaults in similar circumstances within the same area of Tooting between July and August.
The Metropolitan Police claimed Adan’s appearance matched the descriptions given to them by six of the seven women, even though they described their attacker as “olive-skinned” and “Mediterranean” while Adan’s complexion is much darker.
Police charged Adan after two of the women identified him in a line-up (four victims did not). Both said their attacker had spoken to them in English and that he had followed them on a mountain bike before attacking them.
When Adan was interviewed in custody, he needed a Somali interpreter because, as he and his father explained, he did not speak English. Both told police that Adan had never owned a bike and he was at home when alleged to have committed five of the six assaults he was accused of. Later, psychiatric examinations cast doubt over whether Adan was fit enough to be interviewed by the police.
One of the women who identified Adan said her attacker had held an object against her throat, which she later realised was a mobile phone that was found at the scene. Police found that the phone was charged and had text messages in Turkish.
Adan told police that he had never owned a mobile phone and the jury was told his DNA didn’t match that found on the phone.
Despite this, the jury found him guilty of committing two offences of indecent assault and he was convicted in 2004. Because of his mental health condition, he was given a hospital order instead of a prison sentence.
“He has lost his future”
Adan’s father, Mohamed, said he took the decision to seek asylum in Britain to save his family from being caught up in Somalia’s deadly civil war. Instead, he has spent the last two decades fighting for justice for his son. The impact has been devastating for him and his family.
“[Adan] feels very bad and that he has lost his future,” said Mohamed. “His sisters went to university, they’re working, they have a good future.”
His father says that whenever Adan sees them, he can’t help thinking about what could have been. After being refused compensation, it has been difficult for him to move on, he adds.
In 2017, two years after he was released, Adan applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), an independent public body responsible for investigating miscarriages of justice, requesting a review of his convictions.
The CCRC obtained a DNA match from the mobile phone found at the scene of one of the assaults Adan was convicted for. The DNA matched a Turkish man whose description also aligned with those given by the women who had been assaulted. Police records showed the man had been cautioned for an unrelated sexual offence on Tooting Common and had a mountain bike with him at the time.
When the case was referred to the court of appeal, it found that the new evidence “does completely transform the landscape” and quashed Adan’s conviction.
But when Adan subsequently applied to the Ministry of Justice for compensation, for the thirteen years of detention he wrongfully served, in 2022 – he was refused.
Adan’s lawyers challenged the decision in the high court, arguing that new DNA evidence had “demolished” the case against him. The judge agreed that the man identified by the new evidence was much more likely to have carried out the assaults than Adan. But he dismissed the claim “with regret” because it did not pass the test for awarding compensation set by the government.
Adan is not the only applicant refused compensation to challenge the government. Victor Nealon and Sam Hallam, who were both refused compensation despite spending more than 24 years in prison between them for crimes they did not commit, took their case to the European Court of Human Rights in 2023.
Judges ruled in June that although the UK’s compensation scheme did not contravene the European Convention of Human Rights, the bar for being awarded compensation is “virtually insurmountable”.
At the heart of the case was a change that the then Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government brought in in 2014 to the law governing compensation claims for miscarriages of justice.
Previously, victims of miscarriages of justice could be awarded compensation on the basis of “fresh evidence such that, had it been available at the trial, no reasonable jury could convict the defendant”.
But in 2014, the bar was raised so that “if, and only if, the new or newly discovered fact shows beyond reasonable doubt that the person did not commit the offence” could they be awarded compensation.
“The system is stacked against victims”
Labour MP Kim Johnson, who chairs a cross-party group of MPs which focuses on miscarriages of justice, said the changes are failing victims.
She told The Lead: “Right now, the system is stacked against victims, adding insult to injury after the trauma of wrongful imprisonment. To address these injustices, it is imperative to repeal the 2014 law change and lower the burden of proof required for compensation.
Additionally, increasing the compensation limits would more adequately reflect the profound personal and financial losses suffered by the wrongfully convicted. We need urgent reform to create a fairer and more transparent system – the government must act now to put justice before bureaucracy.”
Matt Foot, the co-director of the legal charity APPEAL and a solicitor who represented Hallam, said that the new test effectively “reversed the burden of proof”.
In the UK, the burden of proof in the legal system lies with the state – which must prove the accused are guilty beyond reasonable doubt to convict them. But under the changes, the burden was placed on victims to prove their innocence, even after having their convictions quashed.
The result has been a significant drop in the number and amount of compensation the government pays to victims. The MoJ awarded 35 claimants £2.4m in compensation between April 2016 and March 2024 – a stark contrast to the more than £81 million paid to 306 successful applicants between 1999 and 2007.
“The idea that people go to prison for years for something they haven't done, and we just say, ‘that’s tough, you just have to get on with your life’ and we don’t take any responsibility is a sign of an unjust and inhumane society,” says Foot.
The bar is high enough that even victims of the Post Office scandal, now considered one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in modern UK history, were initially refused compensation under the scheme.
The Ministry of Justice admitted in response to a Freedom of Information request from the Lead that it had refused postmasters compensation between 2019 and 2022. It would not say exactly how many because the number is five or less.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We acknowledge the grave impact of miscarriages of justice and are committed to supporting individuals in rebuilding their lives.
We are actively considering concerns raised to ensure effective support for those affected by such injustices.”
Tyrone Steele, deputy legal director at the law reform charity Justice, said: “Post Office scandal victims struggled for many years to get compensation, and the 2014 reforms put far greater barriers in their way. They brought in an almost impossible threshold for victims of miscarriages of justice seeking compensation to reach, demanding proof beyond reasonable doubt that Post Office software had caused the errors, despite them not having the access or means to prove such a thing.”
The government subsequently created bespoke compensation schemes for Post Office victims that don’t require them to provide evidence of their innocence beyond reasonable doubt. In May, it passed a bill that quashed their convictions.
Susie Labinjoh, the head of the civil liberties and human rights practice at Hodge Jones & Allen, said that the Post Office scandal suggested that the government’s enthusiasm for compensating victims of miscarriages of justice seems to be dependent on public outrage.
“As soon as there’s any sort of general interest from the media, and it looks like the general public are onside, the government are tripping over themselves to make changes,” she said.
But Labinjoh, who also provided legal advice to Adan, said if victims of miscarriages of justice have to rely on media exposure to get compensation from the government, then some are more likely than others to lose out.
“[Adan] has been in a mental health institution, he's Black, he’s an immigrant, it’s not the sort of thing that the media would, at the moment anyway, be like, ‘Oh this is a terrible injustice.’ And that’s tragic, really.”
About the author: Adam Bychawski is a freelance journalist and former staff reporter at openDemocracy.
This is, sadly, not the first time we’ve covered miscarriage of justices because of the colour of someone’s skin at The Lead. We reported on the Manchester 10 where three men were released after their convictions were overturned. And it’s not just in our legal and justice system, Natalie Morris reported last year on how people of colour are being abandoned when it comes to dementia care. Becoming a paid subscriber to The Lead gives us more power to our elbow to report and expose these injustices and inequalities.