Ward's role on behalf of MI5 was confirmed in 1982, when The Sunday Times located his former contact "Woods".Knightley and Kennedy, p. 253 Although Denning always asserted that Ward's trial and conviction were fair and proper,Davenport-Hines, p. 332 most commentators believe that it was deeply flawed—an "historical injustice" according to Davenport-Hines, who argues that the trial was an act of political revenge. One High Court judge said privately that he would have stopped the trial before it reached the jury.Levin, p. 85 The human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has campaigned for the case to be reopened on several grounds, including the premature scheduling of the trial, lack of evidence to support the main charges, and various misdirections by the trial judge in his summing-up.Robertson, pp. 125–57 The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has the power to investigate suspected miscarriages of justice, reviewed Ward's case starting in early 2014, but in 2017 decided not to refer it to the Court of Appeal after failing to find the original transcript of the judge's summing-up.
