Dr Jim MacKeith

Aug 10 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

A CONFESSION to the police used to be considered the ultimate proof that a defendant was guilty of the crime for which he was accused.

Officers felt under pressure to obtain an arrested man’s signature on the paper admitting to his crimes, and so the more unscrupulous ones found their own ways of ensuring they achieved this goal.

Later, thanks to the work of James Alexander Culpin MacKeith and his colleagues, judges began to understand why some confessions could be unreliable and so police fabrication of them became less common.

Born in Leamington Spa in 1938, MacKeith was the son of a doctor who was keen to see his eldest child follow him into the medical profession.

However, having failed to shine at Epsom College, he chose to study literature at Trinity College, Dublin, instead, later completing psychiatric qualifications on his return to England.

In 1977, he was appointed as a consultant to the Maudsley Hospital, London, to find some middle ground between maximum security hospitals, such as Broadmoor, and mainstream mental institutions.

While carrying out this task, he met the Icelandic researcher, Gisli Gudjonsson, and the pair began work that would overturn the legal convention of accepting confessions of guilt without question.

MacKeith was involved, alongside solicitors Gareth Peirce and Alistair Logan, in the overturning of the convictions of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, accused of IRA atrocities.

He went on to work on numerous other cases of injustice, becoming involved in the treatment of British inmates in Guantanamo Bay.

Britain’s own Guantanamo Bay, as Belmarsh Prison was dubbed by the media, also grabbed his attention.

He contributed to a report, published in 2004, that stated eight foreigners detained under emergency laws introduced after the World Trade Center attacks were suffering from clinically severe levels of depression and anxiety.

Some had post-traumatic stress disorder after experiencing terrible events in their homeland.

Shortly before his death, MacKeith was rewarded for decades of work with an OBE for services to criminal justice.

Dr Jim MacKeith, forensic psychiatrist;born October 29, 1938,died August 5, 2007