Tony Martin was a farmer in his mid-fifties who lived alone on a remote property outside Emneth, on the Norfolk side of the fen country near Wisbech. In August 1999 two men entered the property unlawfully. One of them, Fred Barras, died there. The other man was wounded. Martin never denied that he was responsible for both. His case, from first to last, was that he had acted in self-defense, and that case was put to a jury at Norwich Crown Court and then to three judges of the Court of Appeal in London. Neither accepted it.
What changed was not the verdict on his account of that night but the verdict on his mind. In April 2000 a jury convicted him of murder by a majority of ten to two, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Eighteen months later the Court of Appeal heard fresh psychiatric evidence that he had a paranoid personality disorder. The court quashed the murder conviction, substituted a conviction for manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, and replaced the life sentence with five years. The wounding conviction stood, with its sentence cut from ten years to three. He was refused parole in January 2003, lost a challenge to that refusal in the High Court in May, and walked out of custody on July 28, 2003, the day the law required his release. He lived on in Norfolk for more than two decades and died on February 2, 2025, at the age of 80.
Martin was 55 when he stood trial in the spring of 2000. He farmed land near Emneth Hungate, a hamlet in the far west of Norfolk where the county meets Cambridgeshire, a few miles from the market town of Wisbech. He lived by himself.
Martin took part in a local Farmwatch scheme. His view of the police was poor and he did not keep it to himself. At a Farmwatch meeting before the events of August 1999 he told the people around him: "Out there you're on your own, you're the law." The prosecution would put that sentence in front of the jury the following spring.
On August 20, 1999, two men entered Martin's property near Emneth. One of them died there. The other was wounded and left the property. Early the next day, Saturday, August 21, Norfolk police arrested a third man on suspicion of burglary; he was later released on police bail and was never part of the case that followed.
Martin was arrested. On the night of Monday, August 23, he was charged with murder and with causing grievous bodily harm to the second man. He appeared the next morning at King's Lynn magistrates' court, where supporters filled the public seats, and he was remanded in custody.
He did not stay there long. In the first week of September a judge at Norwich Crown Court heard an application for bail lasting about half an hour and granted him conditional bail pending trial by jury. He was ordered to appear before Norwich magistrates on November 2. For the next seven months he waited for trial as a free man, though under conditions.
On January 25, 2000, he appeared in court at Norwich and entered his pleas. He pleaded not guilty to the murder charge, and he denied a charge of attempting to murder the second man, which had by then been added to the indictment. The trial was set for the spring.
The trial opened at Norwich Crown Court in April 2000 before a High Court judge and a jury of six men and six women. The indictment had grown to five counts. Martin denied murder, attempted murder, and wounding the second man with intent to cause him grievous bodily harm. He also denied an offense under the 1968 arms statute that charged him with an intent to endanger life. To a fifth count, an offense under section 1 of the same statute, he pleaded guilty.
The admitted count settled nothing that mattered. Everything turned on what he had believed and intended in the moments that counted, and on whether the force he used could be called reasonable in the circumstances as he saw them. The Crown's case, presented by leading counsel, did not depend only on what happened in August. It relied in part on his attitude toward the police, and the jury heard his words at the Farmwatch meeting. The defense was self-defense.
The jury retired and deliberated for about nine and a half hours. The judge told them that he would accept majority verdicts. On April 19, 2000, they returned. By a majority of ten to two they found Martin guilty of murder. By the same majority they found him guilty of wounding the second man with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. They acquitted him unanimously of the attempted murder and of the count alleging intent to endanger life.
The sentence for murder was fixed by law. The judge imposed life imprisonment, with ten years concurrent for the wounding and twelve months concurrent for the admitted offense. Martin spent his first night under the sentence in Norwich. Outside court, supporters had gathered in numbers through the trial, and a round-the-clock guard was placed on the farm once he was gone from it.
Within a week the verdict was under attack from a direction that had nothing to do with the evidence. After the trial a woman who said she had been on the jury telephoned a local radio station, and the claim spread that jurors had been intimidated. On April 25 court officials in Norwich said they would not hold an immediate inquiry and that it would be for Martin's lawyers to decide whether to raise the claim on appeal. The caller herself had not said that anyone had pressured her. Martin's lawyers had already signaled that an appeal would be lodged by April 28.
The claim did not die there. On June 19, 2000, three judges of the Court of Appeal ruled that the jurors could be questioned about whether they had been intimidated, on an application tied to the appeal. Martin's solicitors were expected to argue that an atmosphere of intimidation around the trial had denied him a fair hearing. No finding that any juror was intimidated has ever been made public.
In late July 2000 the Lord Chief Justice recommended that the minimum term Martin must serve under the life sentence be cut by a year, to eight years. A day later, on July 28, Martin won leave to appeal. His solicitor argued that the trial judge had misdirected the jury by telling them, in effect, to convict if they doubted Martin's account. Because the leave covered the wounding conviction, the murder conviction could be challenged at the same hearing.
Martin was moved out of Norfolk to a prison in Leicestershire, where he spent Christmas 2000. By the time the appeal came on he had dismissed his original solicitors and engaged a new legal team, led by a Queen's Counsel, which set out to reopen almost every part of the case.
The appeal opened on Monday, October 15, 2001, before the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales and two High Court judges, sitting in the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal. It was listed for about two weeks. The court had several options in front of it: to quash the convictions outright, to order a retrial, to substitute a lesser offense, or to dismiss the appeal.
Martin's new leading counsel told the court that the trial had been unfair. He argued that there was compelling evidence that Martin had acted in self-defense and under provocation, and that the trial defense team had misunderstood a central point in Martin's account, so that the jury had never heard the case properly put. The appeal advanced three main grounds: provocation, diminished responsibility, and an unfair trial. The court heard fresh evidence that had not been called at Norwich, both scientific and medical, including evidence from a psychiatrist who had examined Martin in custody and who told the court that his views had softened during his time inside. The Crown disputed Martin's account.
The Lord Chief Justice made plain from the bench that the court saw the danger in the self-defense argument. If it succeeded on the terms put forward, he said, it could lead to "a series of legalised killings," and it risked leaving the law powerless against anyone who killed and then claimed a mental impairment as the reason. On October 17, the third day, the court reserved judgment and said a decision would be given as soon as possible.
The court gave judgment on Tuesday, October 30, 2001, in the case cited as R v Martin (Anthony Edward), [2001] EWCA Crim 2245. It allowed the appeal in part.
On self-defense the court restated the law as it stood and refused to bend it. The jury could only have convicted Martin of murder if they did not believe that he had been acting in self-defense, or if they found that he had used more force than was reasonable. The question of what force was reasonable was for the jury, judged against the circumstances as the defendant believed them to be. A defendant's psychiatric condition was not, as a general rule, relevant to whether the force he used was excessive. Only in exceptional circumstances, where such evidence was especially probative, could it be admitted on that question. The self-defense case had been tried and rejected, and the court did not disturb that result.
The diminished responsibility ground was a different matter. The fresh psychiatric evidence showed that Martin had a long-standing paranoid personality disorder, and the court accepted that it bore on his mental responsibility for the killing. That issue had never been before the jury at Norwich, because the defense there had been self-defense alone. The court quashed the conviction for murder and substituted a conviction for manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. It set aside the life sentence and imposed five years' imprisonment. The conviction for wounding with intent was upheld, but the court reduced the sentence on it from ten years to three, to run concurrently.
The arithmetic of the new sentence was simple. A five-year term, counted with the time he had already served, made him eligible to be considered for parole in about twelve months.
Two statutes shaped the result of Martin's case once the Court of Appeal had ruled.
The first was section 2 of the Homicide Act 1957, the source of the diminished responsibility defense in England and Wales. As enacted, it provided that a person who killed should not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind, from any of the causes the section listed, as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for what he did. The burden of proving it lay on the defense, and a person who would otherwise have been convicted of murder was to be convicted of manslaughter instead. That last provision was what allowed the Court of Appeal to substitute manslaughter rather than order a retrial, and it was what freed the court from the fixed life sentence for murder.
The second was the early release scheme of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, under which Martin served his five years. A sentence of four years or more made him a long-term prisoner. Section 35 allowed the Home Secretary to release a long-term prisoner on license once he had served half his sentence, but only on the recommendation of the Parole Board. Section 33 then imposed a duty to release him on license once he had served two-thirds, whatever the Board's view. In Martin's case those two dates were fixed precisely. His parole eligibility date was September 26, 2002. His automatic release date, the two-thirds point, was July 28, 2003. Everything the Parole Board decided affected only the stretch of time between them.
The Parole Board considered Martin's case in the new year. On January 16, 2003, a panel found him unsuitable for release on parole. Its reasons were that the offenses were serious, that an earlier incident from before 1999 was part of the history, that he had not engaged in work aimed at his offending, that he took little responsibility for what had happened and held the two men to blame, and that the risk of further offending could not be managed in the community. The panel also found no exceptional compassionate circumstances to justify the plan he had put forward for living abroad. Martin asked the Board to reconsider. Letters dated February 7 and February 25, 2003, refused.
The refusal was raised in Parliament. In a written question answered on January 30, 2003, a member of the House of Commons asked the Home Secretary whether he would publish the findings of the recent Parole Board report on Martin, then held at a prison in Suffolk. A Home Office minister replied that the Board's decisions in individual cases were not published.
Martin went to the High Court. His claim for judicial review rested on five grounds: that the Board had failed to consider the Court of Appeal judgment and two expert reports; that its assessment of risk was irrational; that it had given wrong weight to his lack of remorse; that it had wrongly taken account of the media interest in his case; and that it had not properly weighed his family and his ties to the community. A High Court judge refused permission on the papers on April 2, 2003, and the claim was renewed at a hearing.
Judgment was given in the Administrative Court on May 8, 2003, in R (Martin) v Parole Board, [2003] EWHC 1512 (Admin). The judge accepted part of the first ground: the Board had erred in failing to obtain the relevant Court of Appeal material before it decided. But he found that the error had been cured by the Board's later consideration of that material, which was not procedurally unfair, and that even if it had not been cured, he would have refused relief in his discretion. "I decline to grant a quashing order on the basis of that error," he said. The other four grounds were found unarguable, and permission on them was refused. On the first ground he made no order as to costs. Permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal was refused.
Nothing remained but the calendar. Before his release Martin was moved out of the Suffolk prison where he had been held. On July 28, 2003, the two-thirds point of his sentence, he was released on license, and a Prison Service spokesperson confirmed that he was free. He had served the time the statute required and not a day of parole.
His release came with a dispute of its own. A national newspaper had paid him for his story, and the Press Complaints Commission examined whether the payment broke its code, which restricted payments of that kind unless they served the public interest.
Martin lived on in Norfolk and kept largely to himself. In later interviews he said that his view of what had happened in 1999 had not changed, but that the experience had cost him his faith in the justice system. He described himself as "stitched up" by the police, the lawyers, the prosecutors and the judges, and said he hoped his name would one day be cleared. In an interview in 2019 he said that he "did not have to excuse myself for anything." No court ever agreed with him on the central point. The jury rejected his self-defense case in 2000, the Court of Appeal declined to disturb that finding in 2001, and the conviction for manslaughter stood for the rest of his life.
Tony Martin died on February 2, 2025. He was 80.
Martin's own account of August 1999 was that he acted in self-defense. A jury rejected it at Norwich in April 2000, and the Court of Appeal, while quashing the murder conviction on the separate ground of diminished responsibility, left that rejection in place. His later claims that he had been wronged by the police, the lawyers and the courts were his own and were never upheld by any tribunal.
The claim that jurors at his trial were intimidated began with an anonymous call to a radio station by a woman who said she had served on the jury and who did not say she had been pressured. The Court of Appeal allowed the jurors to be questioned in June 2000. No finding of intimidation was ever announced, and the appeal was decided on other grounds.
August 20, 1999: one man dies and a second is wounded at Martin's property near Emneth, Norfolk.
August 21, 1999: a third man is arrested on suspicion of burglary and released on police bail.
August 23, 1999: Martin is charged with murder and with causing grievous bodily harm.
August 24, 1999: remanded in custody at King's Lynn magistrates' court.
September 1999: granted conditional bail at Norwich Crown Court.
January 25, 2000: pleads not guilty to murder and denies attempted murder.
April 2000: trial at Norwich Crown Court; guilty plea to an offense under section 1 of the 1968 arms statute.
April 19, 2000: convicted by a 10-2 majority of murder and of wounding with intent; acquitted of attempted murder and of a further count; life imprisonment, with concurrent terms.
June 19, 2000: the Court of Appeal rules that jurors may be questioned about claimed intimidation.
July 28, 2000: Martin wins leave to appeal.
December 2000: held in a prison in Leicestershire.
October 15-17, 2001: appeal heard before the Lord Chief Justice and two High Court judges; judgment reserved.
October 30, 2001: murder conviction quashed; manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility substituted; five years, with three years concurrent for wounding.
September 26, 2002: parole eligibility date.
January 16, 2003: Parole Board panel finds him unsuitable for parole.
January 30, 2003: written answer in the House of Commons: Parole Board decisions in individual cases are not published.
February 7 and 25, 2003: requests for reconsideration refused.
May 8, 2003: High Court declines to quash the Parole Board decision.
July 28, 2003: released on license at the two-thirds point of his sentence.
February 2, 2025: dies at 80.