In the small hours of November 16, 1986, Clarke Pearce and his fiancée were dining in the Sky Blue restaurant, Birmingham, with Nadine O’Neill (his elder sister) and Eddie O’Neill (Nadine’s husband and Clarke’s brother-in-law). Another couple were dining with them. Clarke was a 22 year old postal worker.
At another table were 20 year old Satpal Ram with Narvinder Singh Shinji and Ram’s German girlfriend, Evelyn Schneider. Clarke asked for the Asian background music to be changed; opinion is divided as to the words he used, but whether or not he uttered any sort of racial epithet, Ram, who had been drinking, used his request as a pretext to start a fight.
As fights go, it was both short-lived and one-sided, because although Pearce was five inches taller and four and a half stone heavier than Ram, the latter was armed with a knife. Clarke Pearce was unarmed, and ended up being stabbed in the back. Ram sustained a small cut to his face and was dragged into the toilet by Schneider where she cleaned him up.
The restaurant staff refused to allow Clarke’s party to phone for an ambulance, (probably not realising how seriously he was wounded). Eddie O’Neill left the restaurant to call the emergency services (this was in the days before mobile phones were widespread) and Ram emerged from the toilet with the knife still in his hand. As he left the restaurant with Schneider and Shinji, he gloated over his victim and expressed a desire to see him dead. He got his wish; Clarke was taken to Birmingham General Hospital but died on the operating table at 4.23am.
In the meantime, Ram attended another hospital for treatment to his facial wound. He was still drunk.
A murder investigation was launched, and Ram was quickly identified. Although drunk he didn’t go home but hid out for eight days after which he surrendered himself to his solicitor, John Morgan, whom he spun a cock and bull story about how Clarke had attacked him and he had stabbed his victim in self-defence. Morgan is an affable man, but although he behaved properly he is obviously not very bright. He believed (and still believes) Ram’s story, contacted the police and accompanied his client to the station where Ram was questioned about the incident.
Basically, Ram pleaded amnesia and confusion. Clarke had attacked him, he said, from a racial motive. He admitted that he had stabbed Clarke once but said he was at a loss to explain the other wounds. He also insisted that he had used a pen knife. Unfortunately for him, Schneider had already given herself up and made a statement that was somewhat more accurate than his. In particular she admitted that Ram had used a flick knife. Nadine O’Neill also gave compelling evidence that Ram had used a flick knife on her brother, and the forensic evidence was consistent with this. The knife was never recovered, so the only evidence we have that it was indeed a pen knife is the unsupported assertion of Ram himself.
Ram was remanded in custody and was assigned a very experienced QC. Unlike John Morgan, Douglas Draycott was no fool, and realised both that Ram’s story was a pack of lies and that no intelligent jury would entertain a plea of self-defence. He advised Ram to plead provocation, a piece of advice which Ram accepted, albeit reluctantly. He also advised Ram not to give evidence. This is always a risky strategy in any criminal trial, but Ram’s lies would have been torn to shreds by any half-decent prosecuting barrister. Ram accepted this advice also, and unsurprisingly was convicted. His friend Narvinder Shinji, appeared in the dock with him and was rightly acquitted.
In common with most others, the English criminal justice system has an extensive mechanism of appeal. Ram’s grounds for appeal were extremely weak but he took advantage of it nevertheless, as he was entitled to do.
Basically he decided that he wanted to change his defence; he had been ill-advised by Draycott, did not really understand what was happening, and had put his faith in his lawyers, who had let him down badly. A vital witness had not been properly cross-examined, and Ram himself should have been allowed to give evidence. In addition to a proper if specious appeal through legal channels, Ram’s friends and family launched another appeal, direct to the public. This appeal is based on lies, distortions, and libels on both the living and the dead.
The reader will read on the Internet and in numerous publications how:
Ram was racially abused and attacked by Clarke Pearce, by Clarke’s party, by six white men...
Ram had been cut and was in fear of his life.
He stabbed his attacker with “a small knife” that he used in his work.
All the members of Clarke’s party were racists (and by implication their evidence should have been excluded by the trial judge).
The police were incompetent.
The judge was against Ram, and elsewhere, how he believed Ram to be innocent!
Ram’s Asian defence witnesses were not called to give evidence.
Ram was not allowed to give evidence himself.
Ram’s barrister had misread the pathologist’s report.
Etc and ad nauseum, but the most sickening lie is that Clarke Pearce died only because he refused medical treatment and discharged himself from the hospital.
Some otherwise highly intelligent people have been conned by the Ram campaign’s lie machine; others are less gullible than mischievous, and have either knowingly allowed themselves to be deceived or have colluded in the deception. Even MPs have been duped, and in January 2000 an Early Day Motion was tabled on Ram’s behalf.
Fortunately, the people who hold the key to Ram’s freedom have not been deceived. Both his appeals have been dismissed by the Court of Appeal, and most recently, the Criminal Cases Review Commission has refused to refer his case back to the Court of Appeal a third time. Even though the Parole Board has been duped into recommending his accelerated release, then Home Secretary Jack Straw blocked it, and Ram remains both a convicted murderer and incarcerated for the foreseeable future. *
The above summary is expanded on considerably on this site, along with key documents including the post mortem report on Clarke Pearce and the full transcripts of both Court of Appeal judgments. I have, hopefully, refuted every lie - subtle and vile - that Ram and his filthy cabal have foisted onto the British public and the world at large.
The case against Satpal Ram is watertight: there is compelling eyewitness testimony, forensic evidence, Ram’s admission that he stabbed Clarke; the only thing missing is video evidence. The crime was also premeditated, not in the sense that Ram went out that night to kill Clarke Pearce (or someone) - clearly he didn’t - but it was not a spur of the moment killing, and was just as clearly cold-blooded murder rather than manslaughter, and was most certainly not self-defence.
I ask the skeptical reader to assess this evidence carefully for himself. Media coverage of Ram’s case has been largely uncritical, one expects this from the left wing and to some extent from the ethnic press, but one has a right to expect better from the likes of Channel 4, which interviewed Ram for its main evening news programme on September 7, 2001 in the wake of the decision not to refer his case back to the Court of Appeal. To the best of my knowledge, apart from the contemporaneous press reports of his conviction, no newspaper or other media has even mentioned the fact that Ram was drunk at the time of the murder, or that he stabbed Clarke in the back.
Alexander Baron,
Sydenham,
South London.
September 21, 2001
* Ram was parolled in June 2002.
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