Justice for Women Who Kill with Harriet Wistrich

"We were looking at ways in which we could potentially hold the police accountable for their failures in their duty to protect."

Welcome to the Lawmanity Podcast where we explore the complex relationship between law and activism and discuss the different ways that law can oppress people but can also lead to real social change.
I'm Jen Ang, a human rights lawyer and activist based in Scotland and your host on the Lawmanity Podcast. This week we're speaking to feminist activist, lawyer, and legend, Harriet Wistrich.
Harriet is the founder and director of the Centre for Women's Justice and a solicitor of 25 years experience who worked for many years with renowned civil liberties firm, Birnberg Pierce Limited.
She has acted in many high-profile cases around violence against women, including on behalf of women who challenged police and parole board in the John Warboys case, women deceived in relationships by undercover police officers, and on behalf of women appealing murder convictions for killing abusive partners, most recently Sally Challen. She is also a founder member of the campaign group Justice for Women and trustee of the charity, the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize. Most recently, Harriet is the author of the 2024 book Sister-in-Law, a reflection on her most notable cases and what it's like to fight for justice for women in a system designed for men. Welcome to the show again, Harriet, and it's such a pleasure to have you.

Hi, I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you.

So in this podcast, I've been experimenting with a surprise opener question to get us settled and to learn a little more about the people behind the legal legends we're interviewing. A good friend pointed out to me that our sense of smell is our oldest sense and observed that we can hold deep connections between the sense of smell and our memories. So if you don't mind, could you please tell me a little bit about a smell that is meaningful for you, maybe one that you just really like, or one that's connected to a place or a time that you like to bring to mind?

It's a difficult question that but I would suggest the smell of the seaside. So when you go on a particularly on a nice bright sunny day to get away from the smoke down to the sea side and you kind of smell this fresh sea smell and hear the gulls and the, you know, kind of anticipation of that kind of freshness, that's a nice smell I associate with getting away from things a little bit.

I love that. I love that kind of grounding with nature and I can actually almost hear as well the sounds that go with that smell and I also reflect that as, you know, lawyers and activists spend a lot of time at their desks in meeting rooms and sort of working all hours. It's actually quite a good reminder as well, the importance of stepping away or having a stopping place to go to.
So thank you so much for that, Harriet. Turning to the podcast topic for today.
So we're here to help listeners understand how the law can be used to achieve really significant change by looking at how you and your colleagues throughout your career have led campaigns to shine a light on the ways in which the criminal justice system has failed to protect women and in particular women survivors and victims of violence.
So today I'd like to delve a little bit deeper into your role and ask you to tell us a little bit about the start of your journey. Can you explain a bit about how you got involved with this work and what it's about and what was at stake that made you think that specifically law as a tool or legal intervention is what would be necessary to achieve the change that you were looking for?

Yes. Well, I didn't actually start out as a career in the law at all. I was doing other things, exploring other ways of I guess my main ambition was around political change and feminist activism in particular. So that was always my big passion and I wanted to find routes, I suppose, to bring about change for women, in whatever way I could and kind of explore that a little bit through kind of film and video originally. That was a route I was exploring. I also as a feminist activist would become involved in various different campaigns around issues.
One campaign I got involved in, in a sort of ad hoc way initially was around the issue of women who kill their abusive partners, violent partners. And it came about because a friend who lived up in the North had seen a TV program called the Provoked Wife, which featured the cases of several women who'd all been convicted of murder, and were unable to use the then-defense of provocation to argue that their conviction should at the very least be mitigated to manslaughter because of the views they've been subjected to, which amounted to provocation.
And yet, the legal system didn't really, that the legal defense of provocation was really designed much more around a male response to being provoked. So originally, it kind of, you know, originates in, you know, almost like men fighting duels and, you know, kind of responding to an insult. That was the sort of, kind of roots really of the provocation defence, and it required a sudden and temporary loss of control to word said or things done. And that was the test.
And what we saw with these cases was that women who were subjected to abuse and violence over a period were often not able to respond suddenly to a further act of abuse or fear of abuse because they knew if they did they'd come out worse from it.
Anyway, the particular case originally that I got involved with was the case of Sara Thornton, who had killed her husband and been convicted of his murder, and she was appealing his conviction was very keen to get public support to raise the issues. And our friend just asked a group of us if we could get together quickly to organise a demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice to highlight the issue. So we, we kind of called around all our mates and campaigners and stuff and said, look, let's get down to the Court of Appeal. Let's make some placards and let's say, you know, that domestic violence is provocation, self-defense is no offense, these sorts of things, and we all kind of gathered outside the court and we put together some leaflets
highlighting the issue. And transpired that one of the groups that was also really interested in Sara's case and supporting her case was Southall Black Sisters, and they had been beginning to build up a campaign for another woman called Kiranjit Ahluwalia, who was likewise convicted of the murder of her husband in circumstances where she'd suffer horrific abuse.
And so what happened with Sarah's case at the Court of Appeal was the Court of Appeal rejected her appeal. And two days later, there was a report in the news of a man who'd kicked his wife to death, and the judge said she would have tried the patience of a saint. And it kind of illustrated everything we had said.
And so we kind of thought it somehow we got the news interested, we captured the public imagination, let us, let's do some more campaigning around this. And that's why we formed Justice for Women. We then supported and worked alongside Southall Black Sisters as they built up their huge campaign around Kiranjit Ahluwalia:

Kiranjit Ahluwalia in the black jacket walked free from the Old Bailey to the jubilant cries of supporters. In 1989 she was convicted of murdering her husband and given a life sentence. Today at her retrial, her plea of manslaughter through diminished responsibility was accepted. Her mental state had been impaired when she set her husband alight with petrol, Mr Justice decided. "I consider justice does not require you to be kept in prison any longer and direct you to be released forthwith,” was what he said. Mrs. Ahluwalia broke down and wept. There were cheers from the public gallery." Later at a news conference, this reaction... "It's a great shock for me today. I wasn't expecting anything. I'm very pleased because finally justice has been done with for me."

And a sort of opportunity, partly arose when after Kiranjit Ahluwalia’s very successful campaign, Justice for Women received a letter from a young woman in prison called Emma Humphreys, who had already been in prison for over seven years, detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure, because she was only 17 at the time of her conviction, and was seeking, was now having given up, was now beginning to seek help to appeal.
And she wrote to us, we then went to Kiranjit’s solicitor, Rohit Sangvi, and said would you take this case on? He said yes but I need a volunteer and so I decided to volunteer and I worked with Emma over a number of months to pull together a really detailed statement of her experience, and from that we gradually built up grounds of appeal and during that process, which took you know two or three years.
I decided to do a law conversion course and then the legal practice course to become a Solicitor and the timing was quite good because just literally a few days after I'd finished my legal practice course exams I was outside the court of appeal, inside the court of appeal when Emma successfully succeeded in her appeal and was released from prison so that was my kind of quite exciting entrance into becoming a Solicitor.

What an incredible start to your legal career, and then - fast forward through a number of years in private practice, and then you and colleagues founded a legal charity, the Centre for Women's Justice. What led you to do that?

Yes sure so I think the Centre for Women's Justice I should say is a legal charity which
I kind of founded in 2016 and it's aims were to hold the state accountable around violence against women and girls and to challenge discrimination in the criminal justice system.
So the reason I decided to establish the charity was that I'd been working after my initial entrance into the legal profession. I'd been working for you know 20 odd years and different legal aid practices but I kind of aside from doing occasional criminal appeals I was really specialising in the kind of fairly niche but growing practice of what was known as actions against the police.
So looking at ways in which you could hold the police accountable for their failures. Now initially a lot of those sorts of cases that were developing were around wrongful arrests, false imprisonment, people being assaulted by the police and malicious prosecution those were the sort of standard types of police actions that were being explored and you know I did a number of those and deaths in custody etc etc.
However because of my pre-existing interest in feminism and my contacts with women's movement occasionally you know friends or colleagues in the women's sector would come to me and say is there anything we can do about you know the police just completely failed to investigate this rape case or failed to pull in any protections for this victim of domestic violence who was then murdered whatever those sorts of issues. So it was less about the police over-policing and more about the police under-policing. And we were looking at ways in which we could potentially hold the police accountable for their failures in their duty to protect, to investigate failures of the CPS to prosecute, and apply basically the purpose, you know, if one has any belief in policing, that is for me.
What policing should be doing, it should be protecting the vulnerable, preventing crime or, you know, investigating and properly holding those accountable for committing crimes, and so that was really the area and in fact I then became involved in this case, involving the serial rapist taxi driver John Warboys, One of the problems with the desire to hold police accountable for their failures is that the police are in certainly in English, Welsh law, and I suspect in Scots law as well, I'm not sure, are immune from suit in negligence, so you can't actually sue the police for negligence failures. You can sue them for, you know, kind of causing harm by over-policing but not necessarily for failure to do things, and there'd been a number of attempts to challenge that. I mean the famous case was around the, another violence against women case around the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, and a case brought by his last victim's family, Jacqueline Hill, against West Yorkshire police, and the court had held very clearly that the police couldn't be held liable under our common law in negligence.
So however since that time we had the advent of the Human Rights Act, and the Human Rights Act passed in force in 2000 basically provides, puts a number of duties on the state, which obviously includes the police, to protect its citizens, and so what we were exploring, and you know there were other lawyers sort of looking at different routes around that, could we argue rather than that there was a negligent failure to investigate, that the police failed to comply with their duty to investigate, and that was the case that was eventually evolved and argued around the Worboys case, it was a case called DSD and NBV v the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, and I brought that case on behalf of two women, and interestingly so we did succeed in the High Court and establish that under Article 3 of the European Convention (ECHR), the police do have a duty to conduct an effective investigation into crimes that met the threshold for a violation of Article 3.
And that case amazingly the police kept appealing it and so eventually went up to the Supreme Court. So we've now got a very clear duty established because we won all the way up amazingly. I suppose through doing that work and then doing other cases around violence against women, it was clear that there were very few lawyers specialising in the right area who could act for women. There was a huge demand for advice and assistance around these sort of cases. There were a few, one or two other solicitors, I knew but it was a really, really small profession if you like. So we decided-- well, I decided I guess that we needed a legal charity, really, to take this case forward.
One of the difficulties also and one of the reasons why I thought that charity was the way forward was because of the very limited availability of legal aid to bring such cases and they're obviously big, complex cases. So because of the limited availability of legal aid, I thought, you know, if we could set up a charity, there might be other ways in which you could bring challenges around that.

That is fascinating, and such a great example of how international human rights law can make a real difference for people in their every day lives - in this case, all those women who have been let down by a police failure to investigate in these troubling cases.
So the Centre was established in 2016 - what do you and your team focus on in the day-to-day?

A lot of the issues are around that those police and other criminal justice failures to protect, to investigate, to prosecute and to keep safe, I guess. So that's not exclusively the area of work, but that is particularly of interest. But because also of my interest in terms of, you know, like the women who kill, but more generally, the issue of victims who are criminalised, because the criminal justice system seems incapable of distinguishing between victims and perpetrators quite often. And, you know, like the women who kill, there are many other cases, which we, we do a big project around where women may accused of offending, or maybe convicted of offenses, when really they're the victim. So that sort of kind of runs alongside the kind of cases where we're seeking to hold the police and others accountable, yeah.

That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing Harriet. So I'm going to bring us to our final question for the day, which is sort of on behalf of our listeners who might have tuned in to just learn a bit more about using the law, but also what it looks like to be an activist and a lawyer. Now there might be someone out there who is a younger version of you, and who's looking at what you've accomplished today, or maybe just, you know, wants to be you. And my question for you is this, what advice might you have for the younger you?

Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to answer that question without taking into account the very different context that younger me's live in. So, you know, the area of law that I practice in has been expanded
You know considering not just around violence against women, but around state accountability but you know that there are many you know it's very very difficult now to get a training contract or you know to qualify in a way that although you know it wasn't easy it seems to be you know that much harder and now people seem to have to spend quite a bit of time being a paralegal before they can then become a trainee, or there's the SQE now, but you know it does just seem to take a lot longer and there's all sorts of other issues that you know in terms of, you know, student debt and various other things that make it quite a different situation.
So kind of transposing my experience from 30 years ago to now may not be exactly the same, but what I would say is that you know, it's good to do other things before you go into law sometimes. It's good to be involved, even if you're studying law straight from the outset just to be involved in other stuff If the reason you're going into law is because you want to use law as a tool to create change then you should be connected with people who are looking at change - creating change in different ways - and not silo yourself off into being a lawyer.
I'm a very strong believer in you know the benefits of collaborating with others working in other areas and obviously for the sort of work I do and many of you will do, you know, it's a critical part of that is also obviously to listen to and to work alongside those for whom you're acting rather than you know to see yourself as some kind of siloed expert really so yeah, I think that that that that's sort of my kind of philosophy, I don't think that would change because of the changed times and context whilst I recognize that just being able to spend a few years Just doing kind of volunteering and activism may be more difficult these days

Thank you so much Harriet for that wisdom and absolutely, I think that that ethos that you outlined about working alongside and with the people who are raising the issues that you are working on is so important and you've clearly expressed that in in your practice.

If anyone is interested as well I shamelessly plug my book, it tells people a bit about the story of how I got into law and how I fought those particular battles. So yeah, if you're really if you are really engaged in these issues, then, you know, you come find out it, a bit about it and what it it was And how I approached it

Absolutely. A cracking read and very clear and engaging, just as you are in the podcast today.

Thanks so much to you the listener, for tuning into the Lawmanity podcast.
In our next episode, we’ll be speaking to Andy Sirel, Legal Director at JustRight Scotland, about a legal challenge that secured access to further and higher education for potentially thousands of young people in Scotland. Tune in to hear how an aspiring doctor, and a student-led campaign successfully establish a right to education in human rights law for migrant young people in Scotland and expanded access to further studies for every who follows in their footsteps.
if you loved this podcast, please do hit the subscribe button and also like and share our episodes with friends and colleagues who might enjoy learning a little bit about how the law really works in practice, and how it can be used to make the world a better brighter place.
Our podcast has been generously supported by a grant from the Clark Foundation for Legal Education. The Lawmanity podcast is co-produced by me, your host Jen Ang, and by the brilliant and talented Natalia Uribe, and the music you’ve been listening to is “Always on the Move” by Musicians in Exile, a Glasgow-based music project led by people seeking refuge in Scotland.