PAUL FOOT 2026: UNSAFE CONVICTIONS

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to Page 94 This is the Paul Foot Award mini-series. We are interviewing six brilliant journalists about the stories that have got them shortlisted for a Paul Foot Award this year. Let's see who's in at number five.
Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

**Adam Bychawski** (0:16)
My name is Adam Bychawski. I'm a freelance journalist, and my stories were published in The Lead and The Big Issue.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:22)
And what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award this year?

**Adam Bychawski** (0:25)
So the story that's brought me to the Paul Foot Awards, is try to answer the question of what happens when the state wrongly punishes you? What does it ultimately owe you? And I told the stories of three people who had been wrongly convicted of a crime and then were deprived of their liberty for many years.
And after all that, a very long battle to overturn their convictions. They were told that they weren't eligible for any compensation for the government.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:55)
How did you first find out about this?

**Adam Bychawski** (0:57)
So, I was looking into this in 2024 when the post office scandal was dominating the headlines. And like many people, I wanted to understand how was it that post office scandal victims were struggling so much to get compensation. And I was surprised to find that the government had for decades administered a compensation scheme.
And so that made me question why did it have to kind of create bespoke compensation schemes for the post office scandal victims. And so I sent a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice, asking them how many post office scandal victims had applied for compensation through this scheme and how many had been successful. And they told me that a handful had applied and all of them had been rejected through this scheme. And then that's when kind of a alarm bell started ringing. I was like, if this scheme is even rejecting post office scandal victims, then there must be many, many others.
And then when I dug into the statistics, I found that at that time, at that moment, only 6% of people were actually being compensated of the hundreds that were applying for compensation through this scheme.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:04)
What are some of the reasons that you might get compensation through this scheme?

**Adam Bychawski** (2:08)
Well, you see, this is the thing. Under international law, if you've been wrongly convicted of a crime and then a fresh piece of evidence is uncovered that leads to that conviction being overturned, you should be awarded compensation. That's what international law says. And that is largely how it had worked in the UK for a long time until 2014, in which the government decides to make this change to its statutory compensation scheme. And so from 2014 onwards, it wasn't simply enough that you had to uncover a new piece of evidence that undermines the original evidence that led to your conviction.
You now had to prove that you were innocent beyond reasonable doubts.
And that's a big change, because it essentially reverses the burden of proof in the criminal justice system. So, you know, for the state to punish you, it has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you're guilty. And now the state was asking people who had been wrongly convicted and had overturned their compensation to have to go the extra mile and prove they were innocent.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:12)
So this is not to do with overturning your conviction. This is to do with getting compensation that you have to prove that you're innocent.

**Adam Bychawski** (3:18)
Yeah, so these people have already jumped a huge hurdle to even get to the stage in which they had overturned their convictions, which is a thing that not many people manage to do if new evidence comes to light that undermines their conviction. So to have gotten to this point and then be told, well, actually, we need even more evidence before deciding is kind of absurd.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:41)
So why is that being treated as a separate matter? Surely if your conviction has been overturned, then you are legally no longer guilty of that crime. So why is that different?

**Adam Bychawski** (3:49)
Well, there is some people...

**SPEAKER_1** (3:51)
It's not.

**Adam Bychawski** (3:53)
It's a naughty legal debate, essentially. And the actual effect of the government deciding to tighten or to kind of change the goalposts in this way meant that it became virtually impossible for anyone who had their conviction overturned to get compensation.
I mean, when I spoke to lawyers, they said that short of the real perpetrator actually coming forward and saying, look, I did it. It's almost impossible for somebody to actually prove themselves to be innocent beyond reasonable doubt. It's incredibly high standard to me.