This is our video, told by Ryan's dad, Adrian about the devastating impact of losing Ryan to knife crime and the catastrophic failure of our criminal justice system to convict the person responsible for causing Ryan's death.
Ryan was a normal 24-year-old lad who enjoyed football and socialising with friends, who had gone out with his lifelong friend on a night out to Chicago’s nightclub in Stourbridge, but never returned home due to being fatally stabbed through his heart.
It tells the family's story of being eaten up by our criminal justice system, having not had any previous experience of the police, our courts or the criminal justice system and then just spat out at the end with no further help and support.
The video shows the real devastation and impact knife crime has on victim's families, friends and communities and highlights our ongoing campaign to fight on for the rightful justice that Ryan deserves.
We hope people watching will help by supporting us and sharing our Justice For Ryan campaign as far and wide as possible - “To be successful, we need this to go national”.
Our campaign for Justice......
We demand a change in our Criminal Justice System to allow the right for victims in serious crime cases to challenge and appeal “perverse” jury verdicts after acquittal.
At present the families of victims have no right of appeal against a perverse acquittal by a jury.
It is currently not a fair or equal judicial system when a judge and jury can be held to be wrong when the accused has been convicted, but are infallible when the accused has been acquitted.
The Court of Appeal can allow an appeal against conviction if a conviction is unsafe. Yet there are no current rights that allow an appeal if an acquittal is unsafe.
Firstly, we want to change our Criminal Justice System to allow the right for victim’s families in serious crime cases to challenge the jury's perverse acquittal decision. That is one that went against the law or against the evidence or which “no reasonable jury could have come to”.
Before this happens, the law needs to provide for juries to give reasons for their decisions. At the moment they simply indicated “guilty” or “not guilty” without any indication as to how they arrived at their decision. This prevents there from being any objective analysis of the reasonableness of the decision, and whether the jury approached the evidence in the proper manner.
We are calling for immediate changes in law to allow for victims families that there should be a legal right for juries to give reasons for their decisions.
It should not be accepted in any court room in our country that you can use a knife, inside a nightclub, against an unarmed person, ultimately taking that person's life away and not receive any punishment or sentence for those actions?
Our current laws are outdated and not fit for purpose. Families up and down the UK are currently being failed by our criminal justice system. Just like us, they too have lost their loved one to knife crime and then seeing the person ultimately responsible for causing their death, simply walking out of our courts, without any or very little punishment for these actions, free to get on with their lives, whilst families are left heart broken, shattered and with no right to appeal these shocking and inhumane decisions.
HOW MANY MORE FAMILIES MUST SUFFER?
WE NEED YOUR HELP!
Please support our campaign by signing our petition on change.org. We need your help to get to 100,000 signatures, so our MP can raise our campaign in parliament.
Never did we think we would ever be in this position as a family losing our son to knife crime and having to fight on for justice, but the reality is, as only we know too well, it can happen anywhere, any time and that families are continually being failed by our criminal justice system. Together we can make a difference...... Together we can force our law makers and politicians to act......
Please support us and share our campaign amongst your family and friends, so that we can continue fighting in Ryan's memory for "JUSTICE FOR RYAN" and the many other families currently being failed by our criminal justice system.
Thank you from Ryan's Parents.