Jeremy Bamber banned from communicating with media from prison

Jeremy Bamber, who has served more than 40 years in prison for murdering five members of his family, has been banned from communicating with the media. Bamber was convicted in 1986 by a 10-2 majority of shooting his adoptive mother and father, his sister and her six-year-old twins at the parents’ family farmhouse in Essex a year earlier. He has always protested his innocence. The 65-year-old has long relied on telephone interviews and exchanges of letters with journalists as a way to draw attention to his case. But his campaign group has told the Guardian he is no longer allowed to send letters to journalists, nor receive them, nor is he allowed to talk to reporters by phone. He was last granted a face-to-face interview with a journalist in 2010. Without giving a specific explanation for the decision in Bamber’s case, the prison service cited “the need to protect victims from serious distress and maintain confidence in the justice system” as the basis for such restrictions in general. The ban comes at a time when the case has received prominent media coverage. Last October, the New Yorker magazine released Blood Relatives , a six-part podcast series questioning the safety of the convictions. Initial newspaper reports of the massacre called it a murder-suicide, stating that his sister, Sheila Caffell, who was also adopted and had recently been hospitalised with schizophrenia, had killed her family members and then herself. …