Hickeys in cash blow
Two men wrongly convicted of murdering Black Country paperboy Carl Bridgewater today lost their bid to win back hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation. Two men wrongly convicted of murdering Black Country paperboy Carl Bridgewater today lost their bid to win back hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation. Cousins Michael and Vincent Hickey (pictured) lost their appeal against a deduction from their compensation for spending more than a dozen years in jail. The men made an unprecedented legal challenge against deductions of a quarter of their compensation package for the board, lodging and clothing they received while in prison. But today the House of Lords ruled that the decision by an independent assessor acting for the Crown was correct and that the Hickeys' appeal should be dismissed. Read the full story in the Express & Star.
Cousins Michael and Vincent Hickey (pictured) lost their appeal against a deduction from their compensation for spending more than a dozen years in jail.
The men made an unprecedented legal challenge against deductions of a quarter of their compensation package for the board, lodging and clothing they received while in prison.
But today the House of Lords ruled that the decision by an independent assessor acting for the Crown was correct and that the Hickeys' appeal should be dismissed.
Today's judgement means that the initial deductions to the compensation awards of £506,220 to Vincent Hickey and £990,000 to Michael Hickey will stand.
The duo were jailed for life for the shooting of 13-year-old Carl, from Wordsley, near Stourbridge, in September 1978 while he was delivering papers at Yew Tree Farm in Wordsley. They were freed on appeal in 1997 and cleared of the murder.
The 49-page judgement was announced in the House of Lords by the country's most senior Law Lord, Lord Bingham, and was a majority decision of five Law Lords.
Lord Bingham said in his judgement today that the imprisonment for murder was "a grave miscarriage of justice".
But the Law Lord went on to say that that the assessor had to decide what the two men had "really lost".
He added: "The deduction puts the appellants in the position in which they would in reality have been had they earned the money as free men."
