The commission tasked with investigating miscarriages of justice says it has been asked to review the murder case featured in the BBC’s Sixth Commandment thriller.
Ben Field, then 28, was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of 36 years behind bars in 2019 after jurors at Oxford Crown Court found him guilty of murdering 69-year-old Buckinghamshire schoolteacher Peter Farquhar.
The prosecution’s case at trial was that Field secretly gave his older lover drugs and spiked his drinks in the hope that his eventual death at his hands would look like suicide or an accident.
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Now, the Oxford Mail has learned that the Criminal Cases Review Commission has received an application that it investigates the case - with a view to seeing whether senior judges should hear a fresh appeal.
Set up in the 1990s, the Commission investigates potential miscarriages of justice.
Typically, it will only take a case to the Court of Appeal where someone has already unsuccessfully appealed their conviction and where new evidence has come to light or a novel legal argument developed.
A spokesman for the CCRC told the Oxford Mail: “An application has been received related to this case. It would be inappropriate for us to discuss the application or make any comment at this stage.”
The Commission was not in a position to say who had referred the case to them.
The investigation into the murder of Mr Farquhar, who died in 2015, is currently the subject of four-part BBC thriller Sixth Commandment. It features Éanna Hardwicke as Field, while Timothy Spall plays Mr Farquhar.
The police only became involved in Mr Farquhar's death after relatives of another of Field’s elderly victims, Ann Moore-Martin, raised concerns that he was conning the retired Bicester headteacher.
There was evidence that Field had manipulated deeply-religious Miss Moore-Martin by writing messages on her mirrors that purported to be from God.
While Field admitted defrauding the woman, who was more than 50 years older than him and with whom he was in an intimate relationship, he was cleared of plotting to murder her. His elderly victim died of natural causes in 2017, two years before his trial in Oxford.
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Sentencing trainee priest Field, Mr Justice Sweeney said he ‘lived by deception and deceit and had been a well-practised and able liar’.
"You further admitted how you could manipulate and manoeuvre people, however sceptical they may have been, to achieve your ends without ever asking them to do so directly," he said.
The judge said that Field murdered Mr Farquhar by covertly giving him drugs and getting him to drink strong whisky and then, ‘if it was necessary, finished him off by suffocating him in a way that left no trace’.
Lawyers for Field have previously tried to appeal the murder conviction, but without success.
David Jeremy QC argued at the Court of Appeal in 2021 that the trial judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, misdirected the jury over the ‘chain of causation’ involved in Mr Farquhar's death. Specifically, whether the victim was ‘tricked’ by Field into drinking the whisky, or had done so out of choice.
The senior barrister said the directions given to the jury before it started its deliberations left the defence with ‘nothing to say. In fact, he claimed, there was ‘much that could be said on Field's behalf on the issue of causation’.
Full directions to the jury would have explained that the prosecution ‘could not prove causation’ as there was ‘no evidence that Mr Farquhar had been forced or tricked’ into consuming alcohol and a tranquiliser drug, Mr Jeremy said.
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