Only a handful of people know what happened in a hearing at Her Majesty’s Prison Wakefield, but all of Britain knows the result: a decision to release on parole one of the country’s most notorious criminals, a former London cabdriver said by the High Court to have drugged and sexually assaulted more than 100 passengers.
A decade ago, the case of John Worboys prompted charges of police incompetence and mistreatment of rape victims, led to promises of reform and raised fears about the safety of a London institution, the ubiquitous black cab. Now, it is once again provoking criticism, this time about a secretive parole process that usually receives little attention.
For now, Worboys, 60, remains in prison, pending a High Court hearing this week. Some of his victims and accusers have petitioned the court to keep him locked up and to order the parole process opened to public scrutiny.
For victims and their advocates, the cloak of secrecy surrounding parole decisions is a prime source of frustration. The parole board does not release records of its hearings, explanations of its decisions or even the names of the board members who hear and then decide a particular case.
“We don’t know what was said, we don’t know who heard the statements and we don’t know if they were able to take into account the women who were attacked but whose cases were never prosecuted,” said Harriet Wistrich, one of the lawyers for Worboys’ accusers, who are trying to have the parole decision reversed.
Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales, agrees, and said he would welcome more openness. But the board is bound by laws passed by Parliament and administrative rules set by the government, he noted, and only they could change the process.
“If the parole system is closed and secretive we cannot complain if people do not understand it,” Hardwick said. “I welcome the government’s review of this area and hope it will be radical.”
He also defended the work of the board members who heard the Worboys case, saying that they had reviewed 363 pages of records, heard testimony from psychologists and prison staff, and questioned Worboys at length.
Worboys’ accusers believe he remains dangerous, Wistrich said. “Some of them are terrified for themselves, their daughters, their neighbors,” she said.
Victims say that Worboys, a former stripper and pornographic actor, could be charming and persuasive, and they expressed a fear that he had manipulated the parole board.
As a London cabbie from 2002 to 2008, he would show a passenger a satchel full of cash, which he said he had just won at a casino or in a lottery, and urge her to share a celebratory drink that he had spiked with a sedative. After assaulting the drugged woman in the back of his cab, he would drive her home, often taking her inside and leaving her on her bed.
Though their memories were cloudy, several women reported the assaults, but the police repeatedly declined to take the complaints seriously, brushing off the women’s claims of being drugged and failing to connect the attacks despite obvious similarities. Several officers were later disciplined for their roles in the case, which prompted the Metropolitan Police to create a unit focusing on serial sex offenders.
In a lawsuit filed by the victims, a High Court judge ruled in 2014 that the police had made basic investigative mistakes and ignored their own policies for handling sexual assault cases, allowing Worboys to continue preying on women.
After Worboys was caught in 2008, investigators said that he had attacked more than 100 women, a figure also cited in the 2014 High Court ruling. But the charges against him excluded most of those assaults. Prosecutors said a broader case risked overwhelming the jury and would have diluted the strongest charges with weaker ones.
The chief prosecutor at the time, Keir Starmer, is now a prominent Labour lawmaker. Though the prosecution service has said that Starmer was not directly involved in the case, some critics of the parole decision have demanded that he explain why more charges were not filed.
After Worboys was convicted in 2009 of 19 charges involving assaults on 12 women, a judge gave him an open-ended sentence with eligibility for parole after eight years. Women’s groups and his victims said the mandatory part of the sentence should have been longer, but prosecutors assured them that he stood no real chance of being set free.
Then came the news in early January that a parole panel had decided to release Worboys, a year after another panel had decided that he was too dangerous to parole. The board has more than 200 members, and three – whose names are not released – are usually assigned to each case.
Victims are supposed to be alerted in advance of a parole hearing, so they can make statements to the panel – the job of notifying them falls to another government office, not the parole board – but many of the women assaulted by Worboys were not told. Across the political spectrum, that prompted angry reactions, and insistence that if Worboys were to be released, he should be subject to tight restrictions, like banishment from London.
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