The family of high-profile Cardiff lawyer Bernard de Maid, who earned a reputation for representing victims of miscarriages of justice, has paid tribute to him as a "very determined person" following his death aged 77.
Throughout his career of more than 50 years, Mr de Maid left his mark on the capital defending people of different backgrounds at a time when racism was rife in the courts and police force. He is remembered in particular for fighting to overturn wrongful convictions, most famously for one of the Cardiff Three and Mahmood Mattan, both of which were successful.
He died after a short illness on July 21. Born to Welsh parents in Rugby in 1944, his family moved to Pontllanfraith where he spent his early years. He went to a catholic primary school in Pontypool, and then St Illtyds Catholic High School in Cardiff.
He trained to become a solicitor and had a successful career that spanned more than 50 years. He worked for a number of firms before he founded De Maid and De Maid solicitors in Cardiff with his brother in 1980. The firm has continued under slightly different names ever since, up to its current title de Maids.
He predominantly specialised in criminal defence. He kept working "to a degree" throughout the final years of his life, and for the last several years he lived part of the year in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1992, he secured a pardon for Yusef Abdullahi, one of the Cardiff Three who were wrongly jailed for the 1988 Valentine’s Day murder of Cardiff docks prostitute Lynette White.
He was Abdullahi's solicitor throughout the entire case - from the original trial and through the appeal proceedings. "Bernard was certainly the leading force in that appeal to get the conviction quashed, which it was," said his son Matthew de Maid, who is also a solicitor at his father's firm.
"I know from speaking to him that it shouldn't be underestimated how difficult it was to get that done, and what he was up against, which was effectively the whole of the South Wales Police. At that time, they were absolutely adamant that they got the right people and were about as obstructive as they could possibly be to try and contain those convictions."
He later found himself in the unique position of representing a second person charged with committing the same murder, when he represented Lynette White's real killer, Jeffrey Gafoor - 15 years after doing the same job for Abdullahi.
He also fought to win reprieves posthumously for victims of injustice. The first and most notable of these was for Mahmood Hussein Mattan. Imprisoned for the murder of Lily Volpert in 1952 in Butetown, Mattan was the last person to ever be hanged in Cardiff and the final innocent person to be hanged in Wales.
"His widow, Laura Mattan, always wanted to appeal his conviction, so approached Bernard in the mid-1990s," said Matthew. De Maid submitted an application to appeal against his conviction to the newly created Criminal Cases Review Commission. Mattan's was the first case that the commission ever sent back to the Court of Appeal. The court resoundingly quashed his conviction in 1998 and declared that the wrong man had been convicted and subsequently hanged.
As part of his work on that case, He was able to get Mattan's body moved from the cemetery in Cardiff prison so that he could be buried in another cemetery according to his family's wishes. "I know he was very proud of that one, not least because Laura, Mahmood Mattan's widow, was quite elderly by this time. So she got her wish to see her husband's name cleared. As a result of this, the whole Mattan family - Laura, her sons and grandchildren - have always remained very close to Bernard, myself and our firm."
He also fought to clear the names of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955, and Danny Driscoll, a Cardiff bookmaker who was hanged for the murder of Dai Lewison in 1927. In 2009, he took on the case of Alan Hodgson, a Welshman locked up in a notorious jail in Ghana for a crime he insisted he did not commit. The lawyer was also behind compensation claims by families of World War I soldiers shot for cowardice and desertion.
"He was a very determined person, and he did not like authority being abused or used in the wrong way," said Matthew, adding: "One of his best achievements was representing people so well and defending them as best as he could when there was a massive amount of racism involved and he had to represent them to the best of his ability when it wasn't an easy job to do.
"He spent a long time throughout the 70s and 80s and beyond that into the 90s representing everyone from every minority background that you can imagine, when the attitude of the police and also the courts was very, very different to how we hope it is now."
Bernard de Maid is survived by his five children and eight grandchildren. The funeral service will be held at St Alban's RC Church, Splott at 11am on Friday, August, and the family request that any charitable donations are made to Pancreatic Cancer Action.
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