Police to video station interviews

Criminal suspects in London are to have their police station interviews video recorded in a Home Office experiment to remove doubts about detectives' tactics, which have prompted some of Britain's most notorious miscarriages of justice.

The convictions of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the men jailed for the murder of newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater and the three men locked up for the murder of Pc Keith Blakelock were all quashed amid evidence that police fabricated confessions.

Now, 10 years after the first moves towards audio tape recording of interviews, Home Secretary David Blunkett has ordered the first trials with videotaped interviews to ensure an "open and transparent" system of evidence gathering.

Scotland Yard and Essex police were due to start the 12-month pilot scheme on 1 December but, after an intervention by the Association of Chief Police Officers, the scheme has been put back until early next year to make sure the forces are ready.

If the experiment is successful, suspects' interviews could be preserved on video or DVD and become a commonplace feature of evidence in criminal trials.

A Home Office document says: "There is a view among those who have experience of video recording that it offers benefits over and above audio taping. In principle, the visual recording of interviews offers an end to disputes in court about what actually happened during police interviews.

"But we cannot be sure without piloting the idea whether these benefits can be achieved in practice."

Guidance to the police makes clear that video recorders should automatically superimpose the date and time in hours, minutes and seconds on tapes throughout recordings. As with audio taping, officers are asked to confirm the reasons for any break in the video taping with the suspect.

The pilot scheme will cover all cases unless both the police and the suspect agree not to visually record the interview.

Tape- recorded interviews became commonplace in the wake of a succession of major appeals in criminal convictions in the late Eighties and early Nineties. West Midlands Police were found to have tampered with written confessions, adding extra pages in the Birmingham Six case and the Bridgewater case.

In London, Winston Silcott and two other men had their convictions for the murder of Pc Keith Blakelock quashed in 1991 following faked confession allegations. Forensic tests suggested that four pages may have been added to Silcott's written statement.