Outlane mum Shirley Green seeks legal help to quash sister’s conviction

Nov 8 2010 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

A GRANDMOTHER is appealing for new legal advice to help quash her sister’s murder conviction.

Shirley Green, of Outlane, believes her sister, Julie Kenyon, was wrongly convicted of murdering their grandmother Irene Waters, having been bullied into making a false confession.

And she is continuing her campaign to help her sister, despite an appeal being rejected earlier this year.

It was alleged Kenyon smothered the 89-year-old with a pillow in December, 1996, at a flat in Halifax where the pair lived.

She was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 12 years in 2003.

Kenyon, now 52, appealed against her conviction based on a coroner’s report shortly after Mrs Waters’ death which ruled she had died of natural causes.

An inquest held soon after Mrs Waters’ death concluded that she died of natural causes.

But the appeal was rejected by the Court of Appeal in May.

The court was told that when Kenyon made those confessions she was suffering from a “personality disorder” and the confessions should now be regarded as “unreliable”.

After the court ruling in May, Mrs Green, 46, wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron and the House of Lords – formerly the highest court in Britain.

But she is yet to receive a satisfactory response from Mr Cameron or The Supreme Court, which took over the legal appeal function from the Lords in October, 2009.