'My whole character changed'

More than 20 years ago, in 1987, a Cardiff newsagent called Philip Saunders was battered to death as he arrived home, after finishing his working day with a drink at his local pub. A police investigation was launched, and a total of 42 people arrested and questioned. One of those held was Michael O'Brien, 20, who was subsequently convicted of the murder and jailed for life.

O'Brien always protested his innocence, but it took 11 years before his conviction, and those of his two co-defendants, was quashed. He was finally released in 1998, suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He has now written a book about his experiences, and campaigns for the rights of the wrongly convicted.

At the time of his arrest, O'Brien was a painter and decorator with no previous convictions, although on the night of the murder, as he admitted, he had been out stealing a car for a joyride. Married with a young son and pregnant wife (his daughter died of cot death while he was in prison), he was stunned when the police hammered down the door and arrested him.

At the heart of the case against O'Brien was the evidence of co-defendant Darren Hall, an erratic and suggestible 18-year-old. Hall gave the police many and wildly differing accounts of his movements on the night, implicating a variety of people. In his seventh police interview, he said that while he, Hall, had acted as lookout, O'Brien and another man, Ellis Sherwood, had carried out the attack on Saunders.

Following the convictions, a "Cardiff Newsagent Three" campaign was launched, and the case was eventually taken up by solicitor Gareth Peirce. Over the years, Hall had changed his story on many more occasions before finally acknowledging that he had made it up. The case was finally re-examined by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which referred it back to the court of appeal, and the men were freed.

"I was very messed up when I came out," says O'Brien. "I would put the three of us in the same category as [Beirut hostages] John McCarthy and Terry Waite coming home after being held hostage. I am on a lot of medication still and, if I don't have it, I can't get out of bed in the morning."

Now involved with the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, he is in support of victims having a sanctuary where they can be rehabilitated on release, with psychiatric help and the support of others who have been through the same ordeal.

But he is anxious not to be for ever defined by what happened. "I don't look on myself as a victim of a miscarriage of justice but as a survivor," says O'Brien, who now has a new partner, with three children of her own. "Things are looking really good now. I feel that I'm on the mend and I want to make a success of my life and not always be known as one of the Cardiff Newsagent Three."

O'Brien is grateful to the miscarriages of justice support service run by Citizens Advice and based at the royal courts of justice, which, he says, helped him with housing and benefits advice on his release.

It took a more lengthy battle to win compensation. O'Brien received £300,000 from South Wales police and £692,000 from the Home Office, of which he has put up £50,000 as reward money for information leading to the conviction of the real murderer. "The relatives of Philip Saunders are the primary victims in this," he says. "I'm just a secondary victim. We have a common aim, we both want the guy who did this."

O'Brien, who studied law while he was in prison, and after release at the University of Glamorgan, writes in the book that the legacy of his conviction has been "illness, paranoia, a series of difficult relationships, and the need to make up for a decade spent without being able to be with the ones I love. My whole character and personality have changed ... Before I went inside, I had no difficulties with showing affection ... I didn't know what a panic attack was. I was an even-tempered youngster who didn't have the anger which I sometimes cannot help from feeling now."

Paranoid and frightened

He describes after-effects including waking in the middle of the night expecting to see a prison officer, and sleeping with a knife under his pillow to protect him from intruders who would kill him. "I was so jumpy and nervous that hearing a car horn would simply make me jump out of my skin. Large crowds around me made me paranoid, frightened, hemmed in."

O'Brien's book comes at an important time. The CCRC is facing budget cuts, which its chair, Graham Zellick, has warned will lead to further delays in cases being investigated.

One important lesson, says O'Brien, who is now writing a book about the prison service, is not to live in the past. His anger at Hall for giving the evidence that helped to jail him has passed. "When I started studying law, I discovered that people making false confessions was quite common," he says. "That helped me to understand how it could have happened. The resentment has gone."

· The Death of Justice by Michael O'Brien, with Greg Lewis, is published by Y Lolfa (£9.95).