In what may be the year's prize legal oddment, a canny convicted robber has just used Britain's stern libel laws to win a $45,000 judgment against no less a personage than the detective who sent him to jail eleven years ago.
Alfred George Hinds, universally known as Alfie, was convicted of a $100,000 safecracking job in 1953, after being arrested by Herbert Sparks, former chief superintendent of Scotland Yard's ace flying squad. Passionately attached to liberty, Alfie tried to shorten his twelve-year sentence by escaping from jail three times, lost 13 appeals to the highest courts in the land. All this moved Sleuth Sparks, when he retired in 1962, to write a series of articles in the London Sunday Pictorial pooh-poohing Alfie's claims of innocence.
Alfie sued Sparks for libel—in effect demanding that Sparks prove that the original conviction was correct. Sparks tried, but a London jury was unconvinced. It found in Alfie's favor—thus casting Alfie's robbery rap in doubt. "Now," he says happily, "I shall press for my conviction to be quashed."
At first glance, Alfie seems to be asking too much. The doctrine of res judicata (the thing is decided) holds that a fully adjudicated conviction is final. But that doctrine applies only to the original parties—in Alfie's robbery case, that means the Crown v. Hinds. The libel suit involved different parties: Hinds v. Sparks, and only by coincidence was the robbery the key issue. Since it was the issue, however, Alfie managed to have himself found "innocent" in what laymen at least could view as a retrial. Whether he now deserves a pardon is up to Home Secretary Henry Brooke, who has a rare legal puzzle to solve.