Secretary of State for Justice

December 14, 2022

All stick and no carrot? Meaningfully rewarding good conduct in prisons

Reading Time: 12 minutesA lot of people tend to assume that well-behaved prisoners get time off for ‘good behaviour’. In the United States, for example, federal inmates can earn up to 54 days off each year under the First Step Act, if staff feel they have remained “in exemplary compliance with institutional disciplinary...

May 4, 2022

Secretary of State refers Court of Appeal Safety Test to Law Commission

Reading Time: 4 minutesThe Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Justice Dominic Raab has confirmed to us that he has asked the Law Commission “to consider including a review” of the threshold test for overturning convictions in the Criminal Appeals Court, in line with recommendations made by the Westminister Commission on Miscarriages...

March 3, 2022

Voiceless Inside – Miscarriage of Justice campaigners take Ministry of Justice to Court over Podcast Ban

Reading Time: 8 minutesThe Ministry of Justice has denied an investigative journalist access to interview Mark Alexander while he is in prison, effectively preventing further investigation being conducted in to his case to establish his innocence. Mark has always maintained that he was wrongly convicted of murder in 2010. This is now the...

Mark’s former Boss

I was very impressed with Mark’s academic abilities, and suggested that he might consider working for me at IBM during his ‘gap year’ after his A-Levels. He leapt at the opportunity and joined the ‘Futures’ gap-year student employment programme of IBM, working for me [2007].

“I recall feeling that Mark had a strong sense of duty to his father. It was clear to me that he cared deeply for him, and devoted a lot of time to looking after his father during his illness, and in particular after his time in hospital [2008].

I have always found Mark to be a very pleasant person, sociable, quick to make new friends and participate actively in social situations. He is intelligent and thoughtful, and has a great sense of humour. He was always careful to ensure he wasn’t taking up too much of my time, recognising that I was busy and being sensitive to that.

He was highly regarded at IBM – clearly a future star that we should nurture, and always extremely popular with friends. He was very popular with the team at Wimbledon and made a good impression. He went to work there for several months in support of the IT systems for the Tennis. Mark is very creative – a great talent that was used to great effect in the work he did.

Mark was highly entrepreneurial – during his law studies he was involved in a number of ventures in emerging internet technologies such as Virtual Worlds and Web 2.0 projects [2009]. These were around providing services to companies, like virtual business meetings. Certainly a visionary! He ran a small company that provided these software services to other companies. He mentioned a few times during his course that he had to very carefully balance his university work with his outside work.

The best words I can use to describe what I thought when I heard Mark had been arrested were: complete disbelief. From everything I know of Mark, the way he cares for people, the way he interacts with people, the efforts he went to in looking after his father during illness, his aspirations for the future, the fact he had everything to live for; there’s no way, to my mind, that he could possibly have murdered his father and disposed of the body.”

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Secretary of State for Justice

All stick and no carrot? Meaningfully rewarding good conduct in prisons

Secretary of State refers Court of Appeal Safety Test to Law Commission

Voiceless Inside – Miscarriage of Justice campaigners take Ministry of Justice to Court over Podcast Ban

Mark’s former Boss

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