Clive Freeman: UK's longest-serving Person Maintaining Innocence Painting

On 2nd May 1989, Clive Freeman was convicted at the Central Criminal Court for the murder of Alexander Hardie and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum sentence of 13 years. The prosecution alleged that Freeman had lured Hardie into his flat, murdered him and subsequently burnt the flat and the body to destroy any evidence and feign the body as his own so that his family would receive a life insurance payment of £300,000, whilst Freeman went into hiding. While Clive could have been freed in 2002, he refused to admit guilt to something he claims he didn’t do (he made this promise to his wife as she was dying), and as Dr Michael Naughton and Clive’s team believe, there was no murder in the first place. Nine of the world’s top pathologists agree that the ‘burking’ (squeezing somebody to death around the torso) allegation is unfeasible, while Clive’s applications continue to be refused by the CCRC. Are relations still so sensitive between Zimbabwe and the UK that whoever signed off on Clive’s guilt gets to create with zero official scrutiny Britain’s longest-serving prisoner maintaining innocence? Now in his 80s and living with cancer for more than a decade, Clive continues to refuse to be released on conditions which he believes to be false. A false allegation and wrongful conviction can shatter a person into pieces - indeed it is often intended to - and it is up to the individual to put themselves back together again.