The LBC call that came in one night in 2013 shouldn't have reached me at all.

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The LBC Legal Hour producers have a standing instruction to screen out criminal cases. I'm an employment barrister, not a criminal one, and there is always a risk of prejudicing live proceedings. So a man ringing to say he'd been convicted of stealing mailbags from a goods yard in Clapham in 1976, and that he hadn't done it, would normally never have made it to air. For whatever reason, Steve Simmons got through.

I'll be honest: I didn't believe him at first. Then he kept talking, and I found myself asking why a man who'd been twenty when they sent him to Borstal would still be insisting on his innocence in his late fifties. He was articulate, and he was angry the way people are when they've carried something for a long time.

By the end of the call I believed him. The trouble was that I had nothing useful to offer. His conviction was nearly forty years old. At the time, he'd been advised not to appeal. So I asked him the only question I could think of. Who was the officer who arrested you? He told me. I suggested he go home and put the officer's name into Google, and I was a bit surprised he hadn't already. Then the next caller came on, and I forgot........

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