Satish Sekar

Satish C. Sekar (born September 1963) is a British author and journalist, and a consultant in forensic evidence.[1] Sekar has specialised since the 1990s in the investigation of miscarriages of justice. His work has been published in newspapers including The Guardian, The Independent and Private Eye, and he has also worked for television documentaries including Panorama and Trial And Error. He has worked on a number of high-profile cases in the UK including the Cardiff Newsagent Three, Gary Mills and Tony Poole (wrongly convicted in 1990 for the murder of Hensley Wiltshire), the M25 Three, and Michelle and Lisa Taylor (wrongly convicted in 1992 for the murder of Alison Shaughnessy). He also worked on the case of the Merthyr Tydfil Two (Donna Clarke and Annette Hewins), presenting scientific findings to South Wales Police regarding the fire that resulted in the police's expert accepting his conclusions that the petrol bought by Hewins that night was not the petrol used in the fatal fire. In 1992, his work helped overturn the convictions of the Cardiff Three and while researching a book about the case, Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry, he uncovered errors in the original evaluation of forensic evidence from the crime scene. His submissions to the Home Office about the DNA evidence were instrumental in reopening the case and the eventual extraction of a DNA profile which led to the arrest and conviction of the real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor, in 2003.[2] The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology said that Sekar's "extraordinary work on the case of the Cardiff 3 [put] academic criminology to shame."[3]

In 2010 he founded the Fitted-In Project, a not for profit organisation that conducts projects on justice issues that have not had the attention they deserve. Their project Just Tariffs will report next year. It highlights the injustice of the real killer of Lynette White being treated more leniently than Yusef Abdullahi and Tony Paris, two of the innocent men Gafoor knowingly allowed to be wrongfully convicted. The Fitted-In Project highlights other vindication cases - cases where the real perpetrator has been brought to justice after a miscarriage of justice, or if the likely perpetrator is deceased, their involvement has been accepted by the authorities. There are seven vindication cases in homicides in Britain and many more around the world.

Fitted-In and Sekar were the only media and journalists in the world excluded from the Lynette White Inquiry Police Corruption Trial, which collapsed in 2011, largely because of the failures of the Crown Prosecution Service. The Fitted-In Project argues that there should be a Truth and Justice Commission to establish exactly why this inquiry was mishandled from start to finish and to facilitate the necessary changes throughout the criminal justice system to prevent repetition. Sekar was appointed CEO of the Fitted-In Project http://www.fittedin.org in 2012.

Early life

Sekar was educated at Reynolds High School, Acton, and Thames Polytechnic, where he studied sociology.[4] He has one brother, Chandra Sekar, a barrister.

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ "The Cardiff Five". Waterside Press. 2012. Retrieved 25 November 2012.
  2. ↑ "The Lynette White Case: How advances in DNA tests can trap killers from tiny clues". Western Mail. Cardiff. 5 July 2003. Retrieved 25 November 2012.  – via HighBeam Research (subscription required)
  3. ↑ Dixon, David (1 December 2003). "Police Reform: Building Integrity". Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology. Retrieved 25 November 2012.  – via HighBeam Research (subscription required)
  4. ↑ Campbell, Duncan (17 September 2012). "The Cardiff Three: the long wait for justice". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 19 June 2015.

External links

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