Nicholas Jacobs - Broadwater Farm Riots Re-Trial provokes protests DSCN9659

Repeat of Trial of 1985 rioting on Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, north London. due to Police causing a local black woman to died of heart failure during a police search of her home,

Keith Blakelock, a London Metropolitan Police constable, was found killed on 6 October when rioters forced officers back, Blakelock was found with a six-inch-long knife in his neck,as the first constable killed in a riot in Britain since PC Robert Culley 1833

Detectives came under enormous pressure to find the killers, amid tabloid coverage that was sometimes openly racist.[3] Faced with a lack of forensic evidence, the police arrested 359 people, interviewed most of them without lawyers, and laid charges based on untaped confessions. Three adults and three youths were charged with the murder; the adults, Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite (the "Tottenham Three"), were convicted in 1987, while the charges against the youths were dismissed. A widely supported campaign arose to overturn the convictions, which were quashed in 1991 when forensic tests cast doubt on the authenticity of detectives' notes from an interview in which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself.[4] Two detectives were charged in 1992 with perverting the course of justice and were acquitted in 1994.[5]
Police re-opened the inquiry in 2003 and carried out forensic tests not available earlier, including on a machete found in 2004 buried near the housing estate. Fourteen men were arrested in 2010 on suspicion of murder. One of them, Nicholas Jacobs, 16 at the time of the killing, was charged in July 2013 with Blakelock's murder and pleaded not guilty.[6] His trial opened on 3 March 2014 at the Old Bailey.[7]
Blakelock and the other constables of Serial 502 were awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for bravery in 1988. Their sergeant, David Pengelly, who armed with a shield and truncheon placed himself in front of the crowd in an effort to save Blakelock and another officer, received the George Medal, awarded for acts of great bravery.[8]