Our children are in prison for murders they did not commit. We’re fighting to change the law

Sally Halsall collapsed screaming when her son Alex Henry was convicted for murder. She recalls a journalist describing her as a wild animal. As she was removed from the public gallery, she heard another mother wail when her son was also declared guilty. An ambulance had to be called because the woman fell ill with shock.

Alex was convicted under joint enterprise law, meaning he was found guilty by association. 

He had been shopping in Ealing Broadway, west London, on 6 August, 2013 when he ran to help friends in a confrontation with four strangers. Alex threw a mobile phone and a punch before fleeing, but one of his friends had a knife hidden in a bag, which was used to stab and kill one of the men and wound another. The scuffle lasted 47 seconds.

Alex, aged 21 and autistic, was convicted to 19 years in prison and was given a life sentence for murder. The man who used the knife pleaded guilty and was given 26 years.

“The trauma of it affects the whole family,” Sally says. “A couple of years later, my mum had a stroke and died. My daughter needed a lot of protection. I had to sleep in her bedroom, because the nightmares and psychosis she suffered were so bad.”

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An estimated 1,088 people are convicted under joint enterprise every year at a cost of £1.2bn to the taxpayer, according to Manchester Metropolitan University. More than half of those are under the age of 25, and 14% are children.

Campaign group JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association) is fighting for legal change so people are punished for the crime they committed and not for being a bystander.

Jan Cunliffe, co-founder of the group, says: “We don’t want to get murderers out of prison. We want people who haven’t murdered anyone resentenced for the crime they did or acquitted.”

And it could tackle one of the government’s problems: prisons are overcrowded. There were 88,350 people in prison in England and Wales in August 2024, leaving fewer than 1,200 spaces before prisons are full.

“We’ve got the highest ratio of lifers in Europe,” says Jan. “We’re the only country in Europe that puts children in prison for life. In other countries, children who killed people don’t get life sentences. Here you get a life sentence even if you haven’t killed anyone.”

Jan founded JENGbA after her son Jordan was imprisoned under joint enterprise in 2008. He was 15 and blind when another teenager killed a man with a single injury to the neck. Jordan was sentenced to life for murder with a minimum of 12 years in prison.

“It’s the most heinous crime that anyone can commit, to kill another person,” Jan says. “And when you’ve gone through that trial process and they’ve proven that your child didn’t kill anyone, didn’t lay a finger on them, let alone kill them, and then bang, his face is on the cover of every newspaper, and he’s a monster and a murderer, it’s horrendous.”

Jan says she felt she was pulled in two directions – wanting to die or wanting to fight. 

Fight took over. Jan founded JENGbA in 2010 alongside Gloria Morrison, whose son’s best friend was convicted through joint enterprise, and they supported others who felt “abandoned” by the justice system, lawyers, and friends. Jan believes it kept her alive.

Having served his full term, Jordan is out of prison, aged 32, but he still has the life sentence hanging over him and has to work to rebuild his future. Jan is still fighting for change and supporting others, with JENGbA in contact with more than 1,000 families, and “numbers are rising every week”.

In 2016, the Supreme Court ruled that joint enterprise had been wrongly interpreted for more than 30 years, and people could no longer be convicted solely on the basis that they could have foreseen that the incident may have occurred. 

But there are people in prison still jailed under these terms, with only one successful appeal against conviction since the law was changed. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies found that the ruling has had “little to no effect on charges or convictions”.

Simon Natas, a lawyer specialising in criminal defence law and human rights who led on the successful appeal, argues “the law should be changed to make clear you have to have assisted or encouraged” a murder. He also stresses that there is a “massive disproportionality in prosecution”.

Black people are 16 times more likely to be charged under joint enterprise than white people, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has found, with the ‘gang narrative’ disproportionately impacting people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

“The way in which the law is applied is disproportionate and discriminatory,” says Natas.

One mother recalls how there was just one non-white member on the jury when her son, who is mixed-race, was convicted of murder under joint enterprise. He had been involved in a plan to steal cannabis, and his role was driving the van, parking around the corner and waiting outside. Someone was stabbed and killed inside the building.

“I’m not saying that my son hasn’t done anything wrong or shouldn’t have been convicted of attempted burglary. There’s a harsher end of sentencing for that and he should have got the harsher end, but to find him guilty of murder… my jaw is still on the floor,” the mother says.

Natas explains there are cases where joint enterprise is effective – such as in a bank robbery where someone acts as lookout, another as a getaway driver and another goes into the bank. In this situation, they are all equally guilty and should be punished for the same crime.

However, there are cases in which violence escalates beyond that expected, and someone who is present can be convicted of the same offence as the person who inflicts the injury. There are also cases where people have left the scene but still been convicted of murder.

In the case of brothers Lewis and Asher Johnson, CCTV footage shows them leaving the scene before a knife was produced and a fatal stabbing occurred. They were 22 and 25 when they were jailed for murder and given life sentences in 2013.

“It’s hard for me because they’ve never hurt anyone. I believed in the justice system before. I feel really let down,” says their mother, who asked to remain unnamed. “It has changed my life. It was so hard to go back to my job and face people. I had to take my daughter to school. She was five when it happened. My other son was 12. They’ve lost their brothers.”

Lewis and Asher’s mother is battling with her health, facing stomach and neck pains with stress, 13 years after her sons went into prison. It has been nearly nine years since the brothers have seen each other.

“The boys are not angry. They just want to move forward with their lives. But I know my Lewis is worn out now. He’s experienced the worst time. He’s been moved about and suffered more. They were together before, in one prison, and then they were split up and they haven’t seen each other for years,” she says.

Lewis and Asher were told not to wear flashy suits in court, and Asher was advised not to talk about his love of football because teamwork could be linked with gang violence. Their mother says Asher had been a youth worker, and Lewis a “really caring brother”, but the prosecution used language such “hunted in a pack” to liken them to a gang.

Kim Johnson, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside who has launched a Westminster Commission on Joint Enterprise, says young Black men like Lewis and Asher are too often convicted using the “gang narrative”. Evidence can be as limited as them listening to drill music, she claims.

The commission, one of the first projects of the newly-formed All-Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice, is calling for written evidence on joint enterprise. It will hear from academics, legal experts, campaigners and those with lived experience.

Johnson previously led on a private members’ bill on joint enterprise which was dropped after the general election, and she now hopes to win change through other means – such as a parliamentary inquiry.

“What I’d like to achieve is a change in the law so that only those who have made a significant contribution are those that are then sentenced for murder. We’ve got all these young people serving long sentences without the hope of being released early. But as far as they’re concerned they’re not guilty. They were all too often bystanders,” Johnson says.

Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has said joint enterprise is of “real concern” but the government will wait for new evidence from the CPS this year before it acts.

Meanwhile, a government spokesperson told the Big Issue: “It is important that those who commit crimes are brought to justice, but we continue to keep the law in this area under review.”

The Law Commission, which advises the government, has been invited to conduct a review of the law on homicide, which will look at how a conviction for an accessory in joint enterprise homicide is categorised.

Natas says: “There have been a number of politicians in parliament from all major parties who have been interested in this issue and have raised it on a fairly regular basis in parliament. That has always been there. But I do think the pressure has ratcheted up and this Westminster Commission is a massive development.”

However, changes to the law cannot undo the impact that joint enterprise has had on families.

Dawn Selskey says her life was “completely destroyed” when her son Matthew Brankin, who has autism and ADHD, was arrested for murder in 2019, aged 19. He had agreed to drive his friend who wanted to set fire to a car, but evidence shows Matthew never left the car and he claims he was unaware a fatal stabbing had occurred.

“It was a good year that it took me to realise that he was innocent,” Dawn admits. “There were four of them that day. Matthew’s crime would be driving without a license, driving without insurance, and arson. That was his crime. I have never denied anything that he may have done.”

Matthew is set to spend a minimum of 19 years in prison – and his life sentence means that he cannot come home after he is released, because his parents live in the area where the crime occurred.

Dawn says: “I’m hoping JENGbA gets the law changed, because it’s not fair. They need to be charged with the crime they committed.”

A mother whose two daughters are in prison for murder under joint enterprise says she feels as though she is “grieving for somebody that has had their life taken away, but they’re not dead”. They were 18 and 16 when they were imprisoned for the murder of their father, who was stabbed to death by eldest sister’s boyfriend following an argument.

The younger of the sisters was given an 18-year minimum term while the eldest was given a 22-year minimum term. They are now 30 and 32 – 15 years into their prison sentences. The eldest had a child of her own before she went into prison, who will be older than her mother by the time she is released.

They have asked to be kept anonymous as the younger daughter’s case is due for review.

“I’m constantly reliving it,” their mother says. “You go through sadness and anger. They say when you lose a loved one, there’s five stages you go through, and once you’ve gone through those stages, you start to heal. But every time I get to my fifth stage, I start on my first stage again. I cried for years.”

Another mother, who has requested to be unnamed because her son was granted anonymity by the courts because of his age and vulnerability, says: “I will not accept that my son has got to stay in there until he’s at least 37, when he were a baby when he went in.”

He was 16 when he was in a house where a murder took place. His mother says he has ADHD and a borderline learning disability and was groomed by a criminal gang, although he was unwilling to share details of the exploitation and abuse he faced in court.

“It’s affecting me. I’m on antidepressants. I had three months off work when he got arrested. I’m a senior mental health nurse, and I just needed some sort of normality. I threw myself into work, but I made myself unwell,” the mother says. “It broke me. I wouldn’t have a relationship with my husband, or book holidays. I didn’t want to do anything, because I cannot be out here living my life when my child is in prison.”

For Jan, who admits she had almost given up on life when her son Jordan was in prison, the campaign to change the law became her reason to live. And with politicians, lawyers and other mothers and family members by her side, she feels change could finally be coming. 

“It’s starting to feel like we’re being listened to. They’re actually listening to our trauma and our pain and how absolutely destructive and awful it is. We go through the court, the judiciary, and it doesn’t work. It’s now become a matter for parliament.

“It takes a certain amount of years before you can find some kind of strength where you fight it. Fighting for your child alone, you will not win. But this is much bigger than ourselves or our loved ones. This is a political fight now.”

In It Together: The Joint Enterprise Podcast, hosted by Maxine Peake in collaboration with JENGbA, will be released on Thursday 10 April wherever you get your podcasts.

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