OPINIONS - Tom Sargant

Tom Sargant recorded this programme three years before he died. He had retired from his job as Secretary of the reform group "Justice" two years earlier. He did not live to see his dream - the Criminal Case Review Commission. He began writing his autobiography, but never finished it. What remains can be found elsewhere on this site (click here). Tom Sargant is indisputably the founder of the modern movement in England to correct miscarriages of justice. Working for a very low salary he was the man who first called attention to notorious cases such as James Hanratty and the Luton Post office murders. Tom was a fervent Methodist. He had suffered great illness before he took on the somewhat menial and low-paid job as the first Secretary of "Justice". However he turned his job into one of the most influential in the field of miscarriages of justice. He was not a lawyer - and was one of the few lay persons in "Justice". But that was probably the key factor in his input into the thinking about miscarriages of justice. The term "miscarriage of justice" was hardly known in common parlance until Tom's work put it there.  

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