Michael Stone (Russell murder case)

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Michael Stone (born Michael John Goodban in 1960) is a British criminal who was convicted of a notorious double-murder in 1996. His original conviction was overturned on appeal but a second trial resulted in another verdict of guilty after Stone confessed to the killings to another criminal while in prison. His most recent appeal, in 2004, also failed.

On July 9, 1996, in a country lane in Kent, Lin Russell, aged forty-five, and her two daughters, six-year-old Megan and nine-year-old Josie, were tied up and savagely beaten with a hammer. Lin and Megan were killed but, despite appalling head injuries, Josie survived and went on to make a full recovery. Josie's recovery and the way she and her father, Shaun Russell, coped with the aftermath of the tragedy were the subject of a BBC documentary. Father and daughter had by then moved to the Nantlle Valley in Gwynedd [1]

On 21 December 2006, a High Court judge decided that Stone should spent at least 25 years in prison before being considered for parole. This means that he is likely to remain behind bars until at least 2023 and the age of 63.[2]

[edit] Trial and legal discussion

The crime received a great deal of publicity and in July 1997 police arrested and charged thirty-seven-year-old Michael Stone with the crimes. He pleaded not guilty at his original trial in 1998 but was convicted and sentenced to life. The Court of Appeal later ordered a retrial after a key prosecution witness went back on his evidence, but he was convicted a second time in 2001. His lawyers once again argued that his trial was not fair, this time because of the way the trial judge had summed-up the case. Stone lost, and his life imprisonment term stands.

Michael Stone's conviction is still held by some to be a miscarriage of justice [3] as most of the evidence against him came from a fellow prisoner who claimed that Stone had confessed to the crimes. The prisoner who provided the evidence, Damien Daley, was described in court as a "career criminal", and there was no forensic evidence linking Stone to the crime. However, Nigel Sweeney QC for the Crown, said that at the trial Daley had accepted "he was an individual who would lie when it suited him" and had nothing to gain by lying about Stone.

It was later determined that Stone had previous convictions and had been diagnosed as a psychopath, and in the light of his conviction the Labour government suggested a plan to incarcerate those diagnosed as psychopaths without their having committed a crime. As English law stands at the moment, those with personality disorders cannot be held against their will if they have not committed a crime, unlike those with a mental illness; the basis for this is that personality disorders are not regarded as treatable. This proposal was later dropped as many people were wary of a plan to lock up people without their having committed a crime, particularly as a diagnosis of personality disorder can often be quite subjective.

[edit] Report

A report in to the murders for which Stone was convicted has made a number of criticisms of his care, including a failure to share information between agencies.[4]

[edit] External links

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