The UK’s joint enterprise law – abolished in 2016 – means that Alex Henry is serving a 19-year jail sentence for throwing a mobile phone and a punch.

Rebecca Tidy is a freelance journalist.

Sally Halsell is anxiously waiting to find out whether her son – Alex Henry – will be released early from his prison sentence this month.

The family has applied for a Royal Prerogative for Mercy (RPM), in which the Crown can grant pardons to people convicted of criminal offences.

Alex is serving a 19-year prison term after being convicted of joint enterprise murder in March 2014. The autistic 20-year old and a friend became involved in a town centre fight with two strangers the previous year.

Despite only throwing a mobile phone and a punch, Alex ended up with a sentence of almost two decades, as his mate unexpectedly stabbed their rivals. England’s strict joint enterprise legislation meant that his presence at the scene was enough to secure a conviction – the prosecution successfully argued he could reasonably have been expected to know his co-defendant intended to stab the victim.

However, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen – a leading psychologist from the University of Cambridge – argues that this is highly debatable because scientific evidence shows autistic people often struggle to understand the motives of others, due to difficulties comprehending body language, tone-of-voice and other social cues. And according to the UK’s National Autistic Society, this means they’re more likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system, whether it’s as an ‘offender’ or ‘victim’.

The family has tried – unsuccessfully – to get Alex’s sentence overturned for eight-years. With support from the campaign group JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association), they even managed to change the law in 2016. The Supreme Court abolished this form of joint enterprise – instead requiring a defendant to have intentionally assisted or encouraged a crime to be convicted.

But though the court acknowledged the law had been erroneously applied for over three decades, this legal reform wasn’t applied retrospectively to the thousands of men, women and children convicted under it. Sadly, this means that Alex and countless others remain in prison on sentences no longer deemed legal.

A report from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies notes that this justice issue disproportionately affects people from minority backgrounds. Over 80% of the defendants supported by JENGbA are people of colour – and more than half of women receiving assistance weren’t even present at the scene, with nine out of 10 females not engaging in violence at all.

Alex’s mum Sally Halsell says, “Joint Enterprise has taken away everything we took for granted, including our sanity and trust. Jobs and friendships are hard to keep – people don’t believe it. After they took Alex away, it was like waking up into a nightmare every day. The only place without pain was sleep – but then there were the nightmares.”

“Charlotte (Alex’s older sister) and I slept in the same bed for six months, as I was too scared to leave her alone. She said if Alex died inside she would kill herself and begged me to promise to follow her. We are still clinging to each other, each glimmer of hope is a new lifebuoy.”

Labour MPs Ruth Cadbury and James Murray, as well as the recently retired Stephen Pound have backed the family’s campaign. And Tory MP Andrew Mitchell has also expressed support. The UK’s longest serving MP, Labour’s Barry Sheerman, has raised concerns in Parliament that the Crown Prosecution Service was failing to acknowledge the impact of autism in criminal cases such as Alex’s.

But for now, the family’s best hope for Alex’s freedom lies with their Royal Prerogative for Mercy application.

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