Mr Justice (Sir Daniel) Brabin

Sir Daniel James Brabin MC QC (14 August 1913 - 22 September 1975) was a judge of the High Court of England and Wales from 1962 until his death.

He served with the Royal Artillery during the Second World War and was awarded the Military Cross in 1945.

He was knighted in 1962.

He conducted the inquiry into the Timothy Evans/John Christie murder miscarriage of justice case, which was conducted over the winter of 1965–66. Timothy Evans had been hanged in 1950 for the murder of his small child, Geraldine, after a trial in which his then landlord, John Christie, testified against him. Three years later Christie was found guilty of multiple murder of women in his house, 10 Rillington Place, and he himself was tried for murder, found guilty and hanged. Before he died, he admitted to killing Beryl Evans, and so it was likely that Timothy Evans had been innocent, and had been hanged wrongfully.

Brabin found it was "more probable than not" that Evans murdered his wife and that he did not murder his daughter. This was contrary to the prosecution case in Evans's trial, which held that both murders had been committed by the same person as a single transaction. The victims' bodies had been found together in the same location and had been murdered in the same way by strangulation. Despite his perverse conclusion, the Brabin enquiry exposed police malpractice during the Evans case, such as destruction of evidence. The neck tie which had been used to strangle Geraldine, for example, was destroyed by the police prior to the discovery of Christie's crimes in 1953. Even the record book in which the destruction had to be noted, was itself destroyed by the police. In most serious cases, police are required to preserve all material and documentary evidence, so the removal of evidence in this case is suspicious. Many police statements were contradictory and confused as to dates and times of interviews with key witnesses, especially of the Christies during the first murder case. Brabin went to great lengths to prefer police evidence wherever possible, and exonerate them of any police misconduct (such as threats of violence against Evans during his interrogation), and he didn't address the allegations made by Ludovic Kennedy about the validity of several of the confessions allegedly made by Evans. He never considered the incompetence of the police in their searches of the garden at 10 Rillington Place, and had a poor understanding of the importance of forensic evidence. The enquiry did little to settle the many issues which arose from the case, but, by exonerating Evans of killing his child, was crucial in subsequent events.

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