Is there any comfort to be had in knowing that police incompetence is not a new phenomenon? Not really, no. But it might be all you can find to cling on to during this harrowing, heartbreaking four-part drama. I Fought the Law is based on the true story of Ann Ming ,the murder of her 22-year-old daughter Julie in 1989 and her 30-year campaign to change the double jeopardy law so Julie’s acquitted killer could be tried again for the crime.
I Fought the Law has two great strengths. First, the awareness that although the overturning of a law that had existed since Magna Carta is technically the most astonishing part of Ming’s tale, it is not the most televisual. That, for better or worse, will always be the body blows she withstood, from finding her daughter’s body three months after she went missing to the two horrendous trials she sat through and years of injustice. These would have felled anyone less extraordinary (and indeed threatened to fell her husband and their marriage, although both made it through in battered but unbowed form). The drama wisely confines the legal machinations to the final episode and concentrates three-quarters of its time on limning the lives of the Ming family before and after Julie’s murder.
The second great strength – as is almost always the case – is casting Sheridan Smith in the main role. Ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances are what she does, and few do it better. Here, she elevates a workaday script that dares not take too many liberties, lest it be seen to dishonour the story, and makes it genuinely moving. She gets help from the strong cast that is – again, as ever – assembled round her.
Special mention must go to the chilling ordinariness Jack James Ryan brings to the part of the murderous Billy Dunlop, and to Daniel York Loh as Ann’s husband and Julie’s father, Charlie Ming, a man at first too broken to support his wife and devoid of her crusading zeal, but who digs deep to try to bring her what she needs to survive.
For all its formulaic structure and the traditional beats it is careful to hit (winsome child asking poignant questions about mummy, bureaucratic nightmares and class snobbery as the doughty nurse faces down the British establishment), I Fought the Law does an unusually good job of sympathising with, rather than condemning, the half of the partnership to whom fighting for justice does not come naturally. Charlie would probably – like, I suspect, most of us – prefer to crawl into a ditch and pray for some kind of impossible peace. In its way, his quieter journey is as impressive as Ann’s, and the drama takes the trouble to show us how.
The police spent the initial period of Julie’s disappearance insisting that the mother of one, who saw or spoke to her mother at least once a day, must have decided to leave her son, Kevin, behind and move to London without telling anyone when she separated from her husband. After relentless pressure to investigate from Ann, a forensics team was sent to examine the house. After five days, they had found nothing to indicate foul play. Eighty days after Julie’s disappearance, Ann was trying to trace a bad smell in her daughter’s bathroom and found her body under the bath.
The delay by the police in investigating and finding Julie – leaving aside the unfathomable suffering it would have saved her mother – meant that the evidence the jury heard in court about the cause of death, and other details potentially connecting Dunlop to the killing, was weaker than it should have been. That almost certainly contributed to the two hung juries and his resulting compulsory acquittal. He was then heard in local pubs bragging about committing the murder, safe in the knowledge that he could not be tried again. Or so, of course, he thought.
The overturning of the archaic double jeopardy law is not a pyrrhic one for the family – it gets the violent Dunlop off the streets and will help to protect other bereaved people suffering as the Mings did. But we are aware of how life changed for them for ever: that their daughter (and Kevin’s mother) will never be restored to them because one man felt like killing her, could and did. So it goes.
