Five fishermen in the wrong place at the wrong time

On the evening of 29th May 2010, I said goodbye to my family, and set off in my boat, Galwad Y Mor, with a crew of three from the harbour of Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. We had a typical fishing trip planned – starting at dusk, we would traverse the area where we had previously laid our crab and lobster pots, hauling them on deck, collecting the catch and setting them back for the future hauls.

However, as we were to find out later, this evening was unlike any other. We had unwittingly sailed into the middle of ‘Operation Disorient’, a multi-million pound drug smuggling investigation run by the Middle Market Drugs Partnership (MMDP) and Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) that was intent on identifying the “daughter vessel” for an exercise that they believed was taking place whereby a container ship was going to pass drugs on to a smaller vessel to bring them into shore. For want of better suspects, we apparently became “it”.

Falsely accused

My wife, Nikki, and I have a small business fishing for crab and lobster and supplying restaurants in London and the Isle of Wight, including my family’s small restaurant in Yarmouth. I take the boat out most evenings, and some of my crew have been working with me for many years now.

The English Channel where we fish is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The night of the 29th May, it was estimated over 200 commercial shipping containers, ferries and tankers used it. Now we know that Operation Disorient had been tipped off that one of containers was due to drop drugs mid Channel for pre-arranged collection. That night the weather was stormy, but as far as I was aware, that was the only thing I needed to worry about.

The first we knew that Operation Disorient had decided that my little boat was the collection vessel was two days later when me and two of my crew were arrested, questioned for 36 hours and charged. Another crew member and a friend were arrested several months later.

An unrelated fisherman had been out checking his pots in Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight on Monday morning and found something snagged in one of the lines. Pulling it up and realising that it was a huge bag of something suspicious, he called the Coastguard. It turned out to be a rope along which were slung bags containing £53 million worth of cocaine.

At the trial, it became clear that the police were stretching the facts to try to make our journey look like part of a coopering exercise.

We are now making an application to the Criminal Case Review Commission for leave to take our case back to the Court of Appeal to present fresh evidence to prove that we were not involved in this crime.

The significance of our case

At the heart of this case are five innocent men, desperate to get out of prison and back to our families and lives.

• However, the case also raises broader issues of relevance to a vast range of cases. For example, the need for defendants to know more about the police investigation before trial – if our trial team knew then what we know now, I don’t believe that we would ever have been convicted.

• At a time when the Criminal Case Review Commission takes at least 72 weeks to process an application, our case highlights the terrible human toll taken by the system delays caused by chronic under-resourcing in our criminal appeals system.

My wife has terminal cancer and I want to be there with her to help her cope with the treatment, but instead I am stuck behind bars, powerless to ease her suffering. And with the delays getting the appeal heard, it’s a race against the clock as to whether I will see her again alive as a free man.

Why this affects others, too

This case is about me and my crew, wrongly convicted of a crime we did not commit.

But there are also wider issues at stake, namely the need to:

• improve practice around police disclosure of evidence, and

• demonstrate the human cost of under-resourcing the criminal justice system

The Centre for Criminal Appeals

Jamie's lawyers have established a new non-profit law practice, the Centre for Criminal Appeals.

The Centre is looking to raise £4,500 towards the costs of going the extra mile to find fresh evidence to prove the innocence of the Freshwater Five.

The Centre is bidding for its own public funding contract in the months to come, so that it can do Legal Aid cases like Jamie's in its own right, on a sustainable basis. In the meantime the charity is raising funds to cover aspects of work on cases like Jamie’s that Legal Aid will not cover. Jamie’s solicitors are currently working on this case under the Legal Aid contract of Scott Moncrieff and Associates. However, the rules on how much time can be spent on such cases, and what the Legal Aid Agency will agree to pay for are highly restrictive. This means that vital investigation work cannot be carried out without support from people like you.

What my lawyer, Emily Bolton at the Centre for Criminal Appeals, says about my case

“What is most heartbreaking about this case is how long it is taking to put right. This is simply a matter of resources – both in terms funding to pay for the analysis and investigation we need to do on the case as lawyers, but also the resources crisis at the Criminal Cases Review Commission which has been starved of funds by successive governments. ”

About the claimant

I am Jamie Green, father of Maisie, Poppy and Jesse, husband of Nikki, Skipper of the Galwad Y Mor and lifelong fisherman. For 30 years I fished the waters around the Isle of Wight. Now me and my crew are serving prison sentences with a combined total of 104 years for drug smuggling, following an investigation and trial characterised by bending of observation logs, missing surveillance records and unexplained changes in witnesses’ stories.

Fast facts

### Name of my case Freeing the Freshwater Five ### What’s at stake: The liberty of five men wrongfully convicted of drug smuggling ### What’s the next step: Persuading the Criminal Case Review Commission to refer the case to the Court of Appeal to hear new evidence