Satish C. Sekar is a British author and journalist, and a consultant in forensic evidence. Sekar has specialised since the 1990s in the investigation of miscarriages of justice. His work has been published in newspapers including The Guardian, The Independent and Private Eye, and he has also worked for television documentaries including Panorama and Trial And Error. He has worked on a number of high-profile cases in the UK including the Cardiff Newsagent Three, Gary Mills and Tony Poole, the M25 Three, and Michelle and Lisa Taylor. He also worked on the case of the Merthyr Tydfil Two, presenting scientific findings to South Wales Police regarding the fire that resulted in the police's expert accepting his conclusions that the petrol bought by Hewins that night was not the petrol used in the fatal fire. In 1992, his work helped overturn the convictions of the Cardiff Three and while researching a book about the case, Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry, he uncovered errors in the original evaluation of forensic evidence from the crime scene. His submissions to the Home Office about the DNA evidence were instrumental in reopening the case and the eventual extraction of a DNA profile which led to the arrest and conviction of the real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor, in 2003. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology said that Sekar's "extraordinary work on the case of the Cardiff 3 academic criminology to shame." In 2010 he founded the Fitted-In Project, a not for profit organisation that conducts projects on justice issues that have not had the attention they deserve. Their project Just Tariffs will report next year. It highlights the injustice of the real killer of Lynette White being treated more leniently than Yusef Abdullahi and Tony Paris, two of the innocent men Gafoor knowingly allowed to be wrongfully convicted. The Fitted-In Project highlights other vindication cases - cases where the real perpetrator has been brought to justice after a miscarriage of justice, or if the likely perpetrator is deceased, their involvement has been accepted by the authorities. There are seven vindication cases in homicides in Britain and many more around the world. Fitted-In and Sekar were the only media and journalists in the world excluded from the Lynette White Inquiry Police Corruption Trial, which collapsed in 2011, largely because of the failures of the Crown Prosecution Service. The Fitted-In Project argues that there should be a Truth and Justice Commission to establish exactly why this inquiry was mishandled from start to finish and to facilitate the necessary changes throughout the criminal justice system to prevent repetition. Sekar was appointed CEO of the Fitted-In Project http://www.fittedin.org in 2012.
Early life
Sekar was educated at Reynolds High School, Acton, and Thames Polytechnic, where he studied sociology. He has one brother, Chandra Sekar, a barrister. In 2006 Mr Sekar opened a joint account with Barclays in his and his mother’s name to pay for her care bills. Later that year Sekar’s brother Chandra was given third-party authority on the joint account and on 9 January 2007, Satish went to a Barclays branch to confirm that his brother should not be given third-party access to his personal current account as well. Sekar then discovered the primary correspondence address on his personal account had been mistakenly changed to that of his brother’s when a payment bounced in November 2007. He was subsequently offered £77 compensation by Barclays. But Satish alleged that Barclays refused to take responsibility for the mistake. Following several subsequent letters of complaint, and an offer of £350 redress from Barclays, he took his case to Fos. Fos did not believe the £350 offered by Barclays was “sufficient to reflect the distress and inconvenience that its errors” had caused Mr Sekar and said it would recommend Barclays made an offer of £500 compensation instead. But Mr Sekar said: “I am rejecting the ombudsman’s ruling both on grounds of amount and on grounds that it has not brought Barclays to account in terms of improving procedures.”
