George Davis (armed robber)
Encyclopedia
George Davis is an ex-armed robber in the United Kingdom
, who became widely known through a very successful campaign by friends and supporters to free him from prison after his wrongful conviction in March 1975 for an armed payroll robbery at the London Electricity Board
(LEB) offices in Ilford
on 4 April 1974. The conviction was based solely on the unreliable use of identification evidence, in the absence of any other evidence connecting him with the crime. Following his release Davis went on to be jailed for two other cases of armed robbery.
ed by undercover
police officers and eye witness descriptions, alleged identifications and individual robbery "roles" were predicated against those photographic records to further complicate and confound the subsequent identification evidence on which the criminal prosecution relied.
A further complication turned on the fact that Davis might never have been committed
for trial from the lower courts (and therefore convicted) had the above blood test results been disclosed at that committal stage. Although it subsequently became clear that the evidence had by then become available to police it was suppressed and this abuse of due process became one of the core allegations heavily relied upon by those campaigning for Davis's release:
was dug up by his supporters, preventing further play in the test match between England
and Australia
. This dramatic direct action protest by relatives and friends of George Davis was accompanied by typical Davis Campaign graffiti
proclaiming "FREE GEORGE DAVIS ... JUSTICE FOR GEORGE DAVIS ... GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT ... SORRY IT HAD TO (BE) DONE". Three men and one woman went on trial in relation to this incident, and one, Peter Chappell was eventually jailed for eighteen months. The Davis campaigners who were remanded to prison to await trial for the Headingley sabotage continued their campaigning in support of one another within the prison system. Geraldine Hughes, the female accused, refused to accept bail until it had also been granted to all of her co-accused.
of The Who
was seen onstage in 1975 wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "George Davis Is Innocent". "George Davis is Innocent" was also a song on Sham 69
's 1978 debut album Tell Us the Truth, and the song "The Cockney Kids Are Innocent" ends with a namecheck. Patrik Fitzgerald
also showed support with "George" on the 1979 EP The Paranoid Ward. Davis also received a namecheck in a Duran Duran
song entitled "Friends of Mine" on the album Duran Duran (1981): the chorus begins "Georgie Davis is coming out".
to various of the Headingley defendants (for example Daily Telegraph editorial "WHEN TO GIVE BAIL". 28 August 1975) and eventually bail was granted to all of them. Bail conditions were exceptionally stringent and denied the four Headingley accused the right to discuss Davis' wrongful conviction in public.
Both campaigns had significant support from experienced London political activists who had a history of organizing radical defence campaigns around the criminal justice system. In particular, among these core activists (who had supported and helped organise "defence campaigns" in connection with The Angry Brigade
arrests and criminal prosecutions) were a number who went on to establish Up Against The Law (UPAL) a London based "political collective". This Collective publicised the Ince case and went on to produce the most detailed publicly available investigation of the 1974 Davis Case Armed Robbery.
In September 1975 Peter Chappell, awaiting trial in prison for the August 1975 Headingley sabotage wrote to UPAL -
A number of UPAL's core activists, involved with both the Davis and Ince Campaigns, had also had late '60's early 70's activist connections with the RELEASE COLLECTIVE.
, Roy Jenkins
, on partial completion of a police review of the case, agreed to recommend the release of Davis without further referral back to the Court of Appeal. Jenkins undertook this highly exceptional exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy
because of doubts over the evidence presented by the police which helped convict Davis.
At the time of Davis' release former Home Office Minister Alex Lyon wrote at some length to explain the genuine difficulties he had faced in seeking to resolve the constitutional difficulties he saw as preventing Davis's release from a conviction that he had regarded as unsafe.
According to BBC Radio 4 documentary, although Davis was released because his conviction was deemed to be "unsafe" by the Home Secretary he extraordinarily held that Davis was not held to be "innocent". The period of official embargo on the release to the Public Record Office
of official papers, related to the 1976 decision to free Davis, has now been extended by 20 years until 2026.
However, according to a report in The Independent newspaper written by the paper's Law Editor, Robert Verkaik, Davis and one of his original trial barristers, Mr David Whitehouse, now a QC, intend to make representations to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the hope that they can return to court citing new evidence and establish Davis's innocence and seek compensation for his period of imprisonment.
On 24 May 2011, Davis' conviction for the 1974 raid on the London Electricity Board was quashed by three judges at the Court of Appeal. One of the judges, Lord Justice Hughes, said that the conviction, based on dubious identification evidence, was unsafe but that the court was not able positively to exonerate Mr Davis.
, Seven Sisters Road. Davis was caught at the wheel of the getaway van with weapons beside him; in the raid shots were fired and a security guard clubbed to the ground. Having been released early in 1984, he was jailed yet again in 1987 for attempting
to steal mailbags. Davis admitted his guilt for both of these robberies.
.
His first wife, Rose Dean-Davis (d. 31 January 2009) wrote a book, The Wars of Rosie: Hard Knocks, Endurance and the 'George Davis Is Innocent' Campaign in 2008.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, who became widely known through a very successful campaign by friends and supporters to free him from prison after his wrongful conviction in March 1975 for an armed payroll robbery at the London Electricity Board
London Electricity Board
The London Electricity Board was the public sector utility company responsible for electricity generation and electrical infrastructure maintenance in London prior to 1990. It was shortened to LEB in its green and blue logo, consisting of the three letters...
(LEB) offices in Ilford
Ilford
Ilford is a large cosmopolitan town in East London, England and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Redbridge. It is located northeast of Charing Cross and is one of the major metropolitan centres identified in the London Plan. It forms a significant commercial and retail...
on 4 April 1974. The conviction was based solely on the unreliable use of identification evidence, in the absence of any other evidence connecting him with the crime. Following his release Davis went on to be jailed for two other cases of armed robbery.
The London Electricity Board robbery
The robbery for which Davis was convicted was very aggravated involving a long chase, with numerous vehicles commandeered and numbers of the robbers injured. Unusually the initial payroll attack was photographPhotograph
A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...
ed by undercover
Undercover
Being undercover is disguising one's own identity or using an assumed identity for the purposes of gaining the trust of an individual or organization to learn secret information or to gain the trust of targeted individuals in order to gain information or evidence...
police officers and eye witness descriptions, alleged identifications and individual robbery "roles" were predicated against those photographic records to further complicate and confound the subsequent identification evidence on which the criminal prosecution relied.
The evidence
A number of blood samples (matching different blood groups) were recovered and formed part of the prosecution case. Of four accused, only Davis was convicted. At a number of very specific locations Davis was identified but the blood obtained from the location did not match his blood. Neither did the blood match any of his co-accused.A further complication turned on the fact that Davis might never have been committed
Committal procedure
In law, a committal procedure is the process by which a defendant is charged with a serious offence under the criminal justice systems of all common law jurisdictions outside the United States...
for trial from the lower courts (and therefore convicted) had the above blood test results been disclosed at that committal stage. Although it subsequently became clear that the evidence had by then become available to police it was suppressed and this abuse of due process became one of the core allegations heavily relied upon by those campaigning for Davis's release:
"The blood samples taken from ... Davis ... at Walthamstow on 18 May 1974 were passed on to the Yard's Senior Scientific Officer, Peter Martin, on 21 May and he reported his negative findings to the police officer in charge of the case on 20 June. At as late as November 1974 on a third bail application, this time before a judge in chambers, and after committals had been completed (28 October) the police were saying that they still awaited the blood results from forensic."
Public activism
On 19 August 1975, while Davis was serving a 20 year prison sentence for the Ilford LEB robbery the pitch at the Headingley cricket groundHeadingley Stadium
Headingley Stadium is a sporting complex in the Leeds suburb of Headingley in West Yorkshire, England. It is the home of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, rugby league team Leeds Rhinos and rugby union team Leeds Carnegie ....
was dug up by his supporters, preventing further play in the test match between England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
. This dramatic direct action protest by relatives and friends of George Davis was accompanied by typical Davis Campaign graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
proclaiming "FREE GEORGE DAVIS ... JUSTICE FOR GEORGE DAVIS ... GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT ... SORRY IT HAD TO (BE) DONE". Three men and one woman went on trial in relation to this incident, and one, Peter Chappell was eventually jailed for eighteen months. The Davis campaigners who were remanded to prison to await trial for the Headingley sabotage continued their campaigning in support of one another within the prison system. Geraldine Hughes, the female accused, refused to accept bail until it had also been granted to all of her co-accused.
Celebrity support
Roger DaltreyRoger Daltrey
Roger Harry Daltrey, CBE , is an English singer and actor, best known as the founder and lead singer of English rock band The Who. He has maintained a musical career as a solo artist and has also worked in the film industry, acting in a large number of films, theatre and television roles and also...
of The Who
The Who
The Who are an English rock band formed in 1964 by Roger Daltrey , Pete Townshend , John Entwistle and Keith Moon . They became known for energetic live performances which often included instrument destruction...
was seen onstage in 1975 wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "George Davis Is Innocent". "George Davis is Innocent" was also a song on Sham 69
Sham 69
Sham 69 is an English punk band that formed in Hersham in 1976.Although not as commercially successful as many of their contemporaries, albeit with a greater number of chart entries, Sham 69 has been a huge musical and lyrical influence on the Oi! and streetpunk genres. The band allegedly derived...
's 1978 debut album Tell Us the Truth, and the song "The Cockney Kids Are Innocent" ends with a namecheck. Patrik Fitzgerald
Patrik Fitzgerald
Patrik Fitzgerald is a singer-songwriter. The son of working-class Irish immigrant parents, he began recording and performing during the punk rock movement in 1977, after working briefly as an actor.-Early recordings:His early songs were generally short, sarcastic efforts, recorded with just an...
also showed support with "George" on the 1979 EP The Paranoid Ward. Davis also received a namecheck in a Duran Duran
Duran Duran
Duran Duran are an English band, formed in Birmingham in 1978. They were one of the most successful bands of the 1980s and a leading band in the MTV-driven "Second British Invasion" of the United States...
song entitled "Friends of Mine" on the album Duran Duran (1981): the chorus begins "Georgie Davis is coming out".
Media sympathy
Before Chappell's 1976 trial and conviction there was significant media criticism of the decision by the courts to refuse bailBail
Traditionally, bail is some form of property deposited or pledged to a court to persuade it to release a suspect from jail, on the understanding that the suspect will return for trial or forfeit the bail...
to various of the Headingley defendants (for example Daily Telegraph editorial "WHEN TO GIVE BAIL". 28 August 1975) and eventually bail was granted to all of them. Bail conditions were exceptionally stringent and denied the four Headingley accused the right to discuss Davis' wrongful conviction in public.
Related campaigns
Importantly, the original Campaign to free Davis overlapped with and variously influenced (and was in turn influenced by) other criminal justice campaigns in London, most particularly the Free George Ince Campaign. Ince, another London victim of identification evidence was also eventually freed. Although the "EAST END SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN...TO STOP EAST END FIT UPS" (October 1975, UPAL/INCE Campaign political poster) had pre-dated the Davis Campaign it went on to develop in parallel with it.Both campaigns had significant support from experienced London political activists who had a history of organizing radical defence campaigns around the criminal justice system. In particular, among these core activists (who had supported and helped organise "defence campaigns" in connection with The Angry Brigade
The Angry Brigade
The Angry Brigade was a small British militant group responsible for a series of bomb attacks in Britain between 1970 and 1972.-History:During the summer of 1968 there were a number of demonstrations in London against the American involvement in the Vietnam War, centred on the American Embassy in...
arrests and criminal prosecutions) were a number who went on to establish Up Against The Law (UPAL) a London based "political collective". This Collective publicised the Ince case and went on to produce the most detailed publicly available investigation of the 1974 Davis Case Armed Robbery.
In September 1975 Peter Chappell, awaiting trial in prison for the August 1975 Headingley sabotage wrote to UPAL -
"When this campaign started 18 months ago I was completely on my own and, if the truth were known, I was probably being labeled as a well meaning nut case, even in EAST LONDON with no friends at all that I could seriously talk to about Davis’ case… I value UPAL’S help a great deal … I thought that I must find other people and that if I make sacrifices then sooner or later others would join the fight…. George Davis is not on his own any more thanks to people like you. There are more things twixt life and death than a pound note"
A number of UPAL's core activists, involved with both the Davis and Ince Campaigns, had also had late '60's early 70's activist connections with the RELEASE COLLECTIVE.
Release from prison
In May 1976, despite a then recent Court of Appeal decision (11 December 1975) not to overturn Davis's criminal conviction, the Home SecretaryHome Secretary
The Secretary of State for the Home Department, commonly known as the Home Secretary, is the minister in charge of the Home Office of the United Kingdom, and one of the country's four Great Offices of State...
, Roy Jenkins
Roy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC was a British politician.The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in...
, on partial completion of a police review of the case, agreed to recommend the release of Davis without further referral back to the Court of Appeal. Jenkins undertook this highly exceptional exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy
Prerogative of Mercy
In the British tradition the Prerogative of Mercy is one of the historic Royal Prerogatives of the British monarch in which he or she can grant pardons to convicted persons...
because of doubts over the evidence presented by the police which helped convict Davis.
At the time of Davis' release former Home Office Minister Alex Lyon wrote at some length to explain the genuine difficulties he had faced in seeking to resolve the constitutional difficulties he saw as preventing Davis's release from a conviction that he had regarded as unsafe.
According to BBC Radio 4 documentary, although Davis was released because his conviction was deemed to be "unsafe" by the Home Secretary he extraordinarily held that Davis was not held to be "innocent". The period of official embargo on the release to the Public Record Office
Public Record Office
The Public Record Office of the United Kingdom is one of the three organisations that make up the National Archives...
of official papers, related to the 1976 decision to free Davis, has now been extended by 20 years until 2026.
However, according to a report in The Independent newspaper written by the paper's Law Editor, Robert Verkaik, Davis and one of his original trial barristers, Mr David Whitehouse, now a QC, intend to make representations to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the hope that they can return to court citing new evidence and establish Davis's innocence and seek compensation for his period of imprisonment.
On 24 May 2011, Davis' conviction for the 1974 raid on the London Electricity Board was quashed by three judges at the Court of Appeal. One of the judges, Lord Justice Hughes, said that the conviction, based on dubious identification evidence, was unsafe but that the court was not able positively to exonerate Mr Davis.
Further robberies
In 1978, two years after his release from prison, Davis was jailed again, having pleaded guilty to involvement in another armed bank raid on 23 September 1977 at The Bank of CyprusBank of Cyprus
Bank of Cyprus is a major Cypriot financial institution. In terms of market capitalisation it is the country's second largest company.As of December 31, 2005, the Group's Total Assets reached C£13,22bn and the Group's Shareholders' Funds were C£818mn . At 30 September 2008, the Group's Total...
, Seven Sisters Road. Davis was caught at the wheel of the getaway van with weapons beside him; in the raid shots were fired and a security guard clubbed to the ground. Having been released early in 1984, he was jailed yet again in 1987 for attempting
to steal mailbags. Davis admitted his guilt for both of these robberies.
Personal life
Some time after his (1976) release from prison Davis separated from his first wife Rose, and some years later married the daughter of a North London police Chief InspectorChief inspector
Chief inspector is a rank used in police forces which follow the British model. In countries outside Britain, it is sometimes referred to as chief inspector of police .-Australia:...
.
His first wife, Rose Dean-Davis (d. 31 January 2009) wrote a book, The Wars of Rosie: Hard Knocks, Endurance and the 'George Davis Is Innocent' Campaign in 2008.