It has been ten years since I met Tony Stock, then a 72-year-old man who, at that point, had spent 42 years of his life fighting to overturn a conviction for an armed robbery in 1970. His case went to the Court of Appeal on four separate occasions and became the first case to be sent back by the miscarriage of justice watchdog to the appeal judges a second time. It remains just one of two cases that the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has sent back to the courts for another go. I wrote a book about his epic fight to clear his name with the support of his lawyer Glyn Maddocks KC (Hon) and the CCRC’s former head of investigation (and ex head of Essex Criminal Investigation Department) Ralph Barrington (The First Miscarriage of Justice: The ‘Unreported and Amazing’ Case of Tony Stock, Waterside Press, 2014).
I won’t revisit the details here (you can read more in ‘Rough
