One of the hardest things about it was the issue about the whole court proceedings, which the children were very desperate to go to, and because of lack of communication with the crown prosecution service we actually missed all of those [court proceedings].

The first time we were told he was summonsed and he didn’t turn up. And the judge at the time said, I’m not prepared to go any further until he does turn up So the second time he did turn up, and said he’d changed his lawyer so he wanted an adjournment. And the third time they told us it would just be a charge and then you, you come back on a second occasion for sentencing. And the police had said to us, well the charge only takes five minutes, you turn up, they say, you’re charge, and the time for you to attend is to come the second time when its, when it’s sentencing. But what in actual fact happened, because by this stage he’d been three times, when he turned up they actually did the charge and the sentencing and everything, so we just got a phone call three days later saying, it’s all happened, it’s over and done with, and that’s what happened. And again, that was something that made us all very, very angry.

And what did he get [as a sentence], just a fine?

He just got a fine yes.

Didn’t you have a police family liaison officer?

We did yes. And to be absolutely fair to the police, they were equally angry about it because they too hadn’t had communication from the Crown Prosecution Service about it. It wasn’t entirely; it definitely wasn’t entirely the police fault. And in fact we had a family liaison officer, and then his sergeant, they came to the house and apologised actually, about it all. And I, I actually wrote a letter to the Chief Constable to say, look this family has had, is experiencing this traumatic situation which has been exacerbated by all this nonsense.

Were you prepared for the court case in any way? Did they take you to the court?

Yes, we had a meeting with the CPS first, that was with all the family involved. We were told in, in as much detail as they could tell us that they thought it was unlikely it was going to be successful. And they said they would do their best, but its, but it was actually finding out where the dangerou was in the charge death by dangerous drivin. it’s where actually the dangerou was, despite the fact he’s killed my wife, he’s gone onto the wrong side of the road and killed her with no explanation. Proving it proved to be exceptionally difficult as things turned out. So we were prepared for that. I was given a tour of the courtroom, it’s a big old Victorian courtroom in another town, just to get a feel of the place, the size of the building, because I’ve never been in a courtroom myself, just to, the smell of it, everything, just the feel of the seats, and just, just things like that so we were, I was I was prepared for it yes, I was prepared for it.

And what was it like actually sitting there during the court case?

I just wanted to, all I was thinking about was visualising the final day, when a member of the jury would stand up and say guilty or not guilty.

That’s all I kept thinking about for months, that, that moment, as it transpired it never even got that far, the court case had collapsed after four days, but you felt very removed from everything, even though the man whod killed my wife was sat just below me in his little thing he has to sit in, it didn’t really register with me.

Did he ever say he was sorry?

No. No. He never said a thing in the court.

And we’d been told from the beginning that he’s stabbed her once in a carotid artery. And actually it turned out that he’d stabbed her once in a carotid artery, but he’s actually stabbed her a few other places as well.

I think it turned out she had about thirteen I could be wrong it might not be as many as that wounds. It looked like he’d been holding the knife towards her and he stuck the knife in a few places. And this particular day [in court], they were talking about the fact that she’d actually sat after he’d stabbed her. She’d managed to get off the sofa. But she must have sat there for a while. And then she collapsed on the floor. And his auntie she were crying, she was still crying outside and she was saying, It was awful, it was really awful. I can’t believe he did that to her.

He pleaded not guilty.

He pleaded not guilty. He, he said he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but not guilty to murder. He said she’d provoked him.

She’d made him do it. She’d gone for him first. She was according to him she was sat on the sofa peeling potatoes and they’d had a row. And she’d gone for him with a knife. And he said, I don’t know. He said, I just saw red and took the knife off her and stabbed her once and then she were dead. But then he went out and bought some heroin and took a heroin overdose and lay down beside my sister. But that’s him that wasn’t thinking straight. And then like I said in court it came out that he’d stabbed her more than once. And they’d actually done some, some sort of test on her hands to see if she had been peeling potatoes. And they said, no, the only fingerprints that were on the knife were his. There was no starch on my sister. There was no starch on the knife. They just even the judge in his summing up said, You’ve just told us one pack of lies after another to save your own skin. He said, At the end of day an eleven year old child is without his mother and a newborn baby was never born because you’ve taken the mother away.

And so did the jury find him guilty?

Yes within a couple of hours. I think it was probably about three hours. They found him guilty of murder. And he got fourteen and, fourteen years so many days because he’d done so long on remand.

There’s no soul, there’s no emotion, there’s no love, there’s no nothing that comes out of Crown Courts. And the judges as well. The judges are there to do a job, they’re not there to get emotionally involved, if they were they’d be taking sides.

So they’re, they’re quite distant if you like and they’re there just to hear the facts. And I think you have to take that on board that, that the trial is not a happy time at all.

No.

It’s not a happy place to be. It’s not a happy environment. And you’re in limbo really when it, when it comes to a death where there’s going to be a trial. You’re in limbo for that year because you can’t move on.

Do you mid saying a bit about the court case now?

Yes, the court case was horrific from start to finish. It’s a day thing that you have to do. His trial went on for two and a half weeks. A court is a horrible place to have to go. It’s cold. You have lots of other people there in, in different courtrooms for different reasons. The whole, the whole thing is just negative. There’s not one positive that come out of it. When you’re there, we had a family room so we were very lucky with our family liaison officer and a police officer, that we had a room where we could go to… away from his family. Because they, there was actually two up on trial, one was for murder and there was another person who was up for accessory for murder. So, at the beginning there were two people.

Connected with your son?

Connected with my son. And in, in the trial one was found not guilty to all charges and walked. But obviously his family were there at the time and, and then the person that killed my son, his family were there. And because he [the defendant] had lied so much about the course of events that led to my son’s death they had obviously, because it was their son, just got totally embroiled in what he’d said and totally believed him, even when he was found guilty and the judge said that, you know, he’d planned this all along, he knew exactly what he was doing. Even now they’re still very much that, you know, it was an accident and my son came towards him and it was because my son came towards him in a threatening manner that he felt out of fear he had to stab him.

So we had to have the whole thing, where we were in the public gallery with them. And the public galleries are small. And you just have a walkway between two families.

How awful.

And you have the intimidation, the stares, and everything that goes on with a trial really. And you have to be so strong not to, and you have to be so strong, or we had to for Kevin because we knew that it was vital that the jury heard the truth and the facts.

And then of course you have to listen to the defence, just knocking your son down. And trying to discredit him and make him out to be a liar and somebody that he’s not.

How awful.

To say somebody whos lying and you have to sit through two and a half weeks knowing that that person’s lying through his teeth.

How terrible.

And at one stage because we were sitting where the witness stand is I was feet, feet from him.

I mean, what was the verdict in the end?

The verdict was, was unanimous and it was very, very quick. And considering that they had to do it on two people, for accessory to murder and murder, it was very, very quick and I suppose if you divided that in half it must have taken them two hours, a minimum, just two hours to convict. Because like I say, all along they’d made their minds up.

And it was guilty.

Of murder?

Of murder. But the other one was not guilty. He was up on three charges: affray, accessory to murder, and the third one, he walked free. But, to be fair, he turned it round to be on our side.

So were you satisfied with the verdict?

I was satisfied, yeah.

Yes.

We got to the Crown Courts for the first day and I had to, I was sat in a separate room with my mother, and then went into the actual court and it’s just lots of hanging around. it’s so stressful. You’re just hanging around for hours. No-one tells you what’s going on. And then they said, A few witnesses here, we’re going to have to adjourn today and go home That was after being there for about six hours. So we went home. And I started to get a bit of a bad feeling to be honest that something wasn’t right. I got back the second day and they said that the expert witness for the younger male had pulled out of giving evidence. He was trying to get off on the grounds that he had ADHD and she’d said, Oh yes and then I think she’d, at the end she’d decided that no it wasn’t an excuse for his behaviour.

Then they called me and my ex-partner in and said, Oh the bad news is that the, we’ve done some plea bargaining and the elder two, the 27 and a 35 year old are going to we’re not going to charge them with murder. We’re going to charge them with Grievous Bodily Harm I just couldn’t believe it.

And the other one has pleaded guilty.

To murder?

To murder. He took the rap for the other two. Without a shadow of a doubt. I went ballistic, at the CPS. But they just, it’s like they’ve just got no heart.

So they, they
They, it’s just so clinical.

…did they discuss it with you at all?

Oh, no, oh no, not at all. You get to know nothing. No decisions, they just called us in and said, This is what we’re doing And it’s like it or lump it. So we then went back in, all the jury were there and the judge got up and said there’s a decision been made, the elder two, he named them, they were there, are not guilty of murder and they are to be done for Grievous Bodily Harm. And then the youngest lad he said, whos, whos, whos 18 today like it was, you know, let’s all wish him happy birthday, has pleaded guilty to murder. Well, well done for pleading guilty. Oh it was just, it was a joke.

So the other two got four years. And they were out in 18 months. Well that’s another tale. And the other lad got 12 years minimum.

You said you had to be a witness. Were you called as a witness?

None of us were, nobody was because they made the decision without even consulting us. Never spoke, and what they did to my mother, the judge said we’ll leave it to lie on file. So my, my mother was no longer classed as a victim. The fact that she’d been battered, they said, because they’d pleaded guilty to Grievous Bodily Harm and to murder we’re not going to charge them with what, what they’ve done to you. My mum was devastated by that. It was, I was just really disappointed. So I appealed.

And how do you go about doing an appeal?

Well, that information I’d got from SAMM. So it was, it was so good that they’d been to see me because I would never have known about that. And I appealed to Goldsmith, Lord Goldsmith. I went through my MP who was absolutely fantastic.

I rang his office and asked if I could make an appointment to see him. I went with my ex-partner, Ben’s dad, and we sat there and he was furious. He said, it’s, all the papers said it was a joke, the trial. There, there was lots of ba

Yes, these brothers were charged jointly with Westley’s murder. Sadly the one that had caused the whole thing to unfold in the first place, the brother that had unreasonably tried to push in front of Westley, we subsequently came to realise that they had both been involved in violence, in carrying knives, and probably now they both would have been found guilty of murder. But as it happened the one that caused the whole thing was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter, and is due to be released in March of 2009. That’s very hard for me and the rest of the family. I’ve tried very much to protect Westley’s brother and sister from that knowledge or from the awareness too much of that situation because Westley’s sister’s birthday is in March, I will probably have to speak to them nearer the time, because I don’t know how much of it will be reported in the papers. When the actual appeal, the last appeal went ahead earlier this year because the appeal was being heard in London, and it wasn’t common knowledge, I didn’t think for one moment that it would be reported in the local papers, and it was splashed all over the papers so once again you know, as much as I try and protect the family, invariably it creeps up to bite you somewhere.

What happened to the other one, was he charged with

The other one was found guilty of murder. But he was given a life sentence, but that life sentence means that he will serve 15 years before he can apply for parole. Now, he had previous history of violence. Why has he only got a tariff of 15 years, a starting tariff effectively, under the present rules through the criminal justice act of 2003, that is the starting tariff for a life sentence for someone over 18 years of age.

That’s the minimum?

That’s the minimum. Now if they had shot my son they would probably have, or he rather, the one that was found guilty of murder, would’ve probably got 20 to 25.

Why does it make a difference?

Well exactly, why does it make a difference? And that’s been the main reason why, where I started out with the campaign, and that is a) to raise the awareness of the fact that if you stab somebody in the chest or in the neck the likelihood is that person will die, and therefore that’s almost an act of execution. That person hasn’t set out to harm the person; they’ve set out to most probably kill the person.

And in those circumstances, with a history of violence and a history of carrying knives, knife crime if you like, knife based murder and a murder to a gun should be a comparable life sentence. Now from the original campaign, of asking the government to deal with knife crime and gun crime in a similar sense, we have actually on the lower end, people that are found to be carrying a knife or a gun got close to the sentences that can be imposed, but invariably they’re not being imposed. But in terms of murder and manslaughter, they are still very far apart on the actual life sentences, tariffs that are given.

Do you want to say a little bit about the court case and what’s happened since then?

Well several of the people who were proven to be behind the bombings have been captured. I think some of those have been executed. The main people behind the bombings haven’t been captured. One is in Guantanamo Bay being held by the Americans. Members of the families who have suffered from the Bali bombings that I’ve spoken to have variously said that they can’t wait until the bombers or those responsible have been eradicated. I don’t take that view. I don’t think it helps anybody to be vengeful. I don’t believe in the death penalty and I think while a lot of people I can understand want to get their own back and want to see justice done and they will see it, I’m, I’d far rather a different kind of justice was carried out and that is that if somebody has committed an awful crime in the way that they have, that they should live to experience the effects of that crime. They shouldn’t be given the easy way out with a bullet through the heart which is what happened to three or four of them. But the people that have been executed were the people that played the bit roles, they’re not the, they’re not the real perpetrators.

The what roles?

They’ve only done little bits and pieces.

Oh yes.

You know they, they’ve bought a van, to put the explosives in, they provided shelter for the bombers, now these are the people that have been arrested and found guilty and things like that. But the real, the real perpetrators are still at large, two or three of them are. One of them who isn’t at large is in American custody, so I think it’s good that justice can be seen to be done, but I think, and this relates to events such as this where they occur overseas, but you have to accept that when you go abroad, when you go to other places, in the same way that you have to abide by the rules then so do the people that live there. And if rules in somewhere like Indonesia says that okay well we, we’ll pardon you in twelve months and even though you might have killed 202 people, you’re allowed to walk free because that’s how the system works, you just have to accept that. You have to respect the judicial system wherever you happen to be, and if you don’t want to go to somewhere where you don’t like the judicial system don’t go there.

it’s that kind of thing. But I don’t think that the people involved in the bombings have been executed helps in the least. It certainly doesn’t help me. I think it’s a purely personal belief but I don’t believe in capital punishment anyway, so I think that, you know, there’s been more bloodshed split in my brothers name as far as I’m concerned, and I think that’s a retrograde kind of step. But I know, I know that there are people that were baying for blood, and have got it. And that’s going to enable them to sort of move on, I think, possibly not, because they’ll move on to the next gripe.