RAPIST ESCAPES JUSTICE AFTER POLICE FILES ARE LOST

Hazel Backwell, who enjoyed gardening, radio discussion programmes and sharing a pot of tea with neighbours, lived in a Victorian terraced house in Stratford, East London.

She was awoken at 4 o'clock one monring in 1997 in her downstairs bedroom to find an intruder standing by the window. He bound, beat and raped her and stuffed her into a small understairs cupboard where she was discovered 15 hours later. She spent three weeks in hospital but, say her family, never really recovered and was unable to return to her home.

She very bravely waived her right to anonymity and gave an interview to The Times in December 2000.

She retreated to a retirement home and died five years later although, her son told the Daily Mail, she effectively died the day she was raped.

The man put on trial for the attack was acquitted, even though a DNA link made him almost certainly the rapist. Not only that, he has since been protected by an anonymity order that only last month was finally lifted.

A rare combination of legal loopholes meant that, for the past 12 years, Wendell Baker has enjoyed both his freedom and an anonymity scarcely ever granted to defendants in criminal trials.

The sequence of events began with the trial in 1999, when an Old Bailey judge ruled that the DNA evidence relied on by the prosecution was inadmissible. The police took a DNA profile from the semen found on Hazel Backwell and then ran this through the national DNA database set up in 1997.

Initially there were no matches. But in January 1998 Baker was arrested for a burglary in Hackney. He gave police an alias but provided a saliva sample from which his DNA was logged.

A few months later he was acquitted of this burglary. But in breach of the law, which required samples of acquitted defendants to be destroyed, the sample was retained — and when another test was run, a match came up with Hazel Backwells attacker.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• convicted criminal
• rapist
• east London
• savage attack
• double jeopardy
• police
• cock up
• DNA
• knife carrying
• affray
• assault

[Mr15GS]

Public hangings?

[12Zwolf]

Thank You For Posting; It isn't 'double jeopardy', the problem is the attacker wasn't charged correctly for the crimes committed, e.g., burglary, illegal occupation of an area, vandalism, intent to bodily harm, and violent rape, plus the attacker needs to be registered as a 'violent sex offender', the justice system needs to be methodical about the charges brought against a criminal(s).

Cheers!

Valkyrie Ziege Mourne

[Realiteit01]

One bullet, anyone can do it to him.

[britishrazorwit]

Time for the public to exact some street justice...anyone who knows where this fucking animal lives should pay him a visit!

[Japonica71]

This animal should have been shot. My thoughts go out to Hazel Blackwells family and I hope that justice finally prevails.

[bodicatudor]

i now escort my 77yr old mother when

she gos out.

its clear to me that this country cannot

protect our elderly anymore..

[aybesea]

It's not an accident that this lowest common denominator sacks of shit like this are walking the streets of the civilized world being patronised and slavered over by metrosexual social service types

[24918433]

NO ! time to shoot cunts like this !!!!!!

[doeelectro]

time to bring CUNTS liike this to justice