2nd September 2026
Part 15 of an investigation into Stockport Council’s handling of Michael Parnell, 2010–2011
Before there was a curfew, a tag, or a bail document, there was a cell. These four documents show Mr Parnell being processed into the prison system in September 2009 — and then the extraordinary conditions attached to his release.
Prisoner BN3845
A prisoner PIN number form and two intake tags record Mr Parnell — surname and initials handwritten across a stark yellow card, prison number BN3845 — passing through the reception system first at HMP Kingston and then, on 14 September 2009, HMP Forest Bank, formally received as a transfer from Stockport Magistrates’ Court. These are not documents anyone accumulates by accident. They are the ordinary, procedural paperwork of a man being physically imprisoned, however briefly, while his case was still unresolved.
Four days later, on 18 September 2009, Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court granted him bail. Someone — it isn’t clear who, but the word is written in red ink across the top of the official record — has scrawled a single word above his name: “INMATE.”
What Bail Actually Meant
The conditions attached to that bail were not light-touch. He was required to reside at a specified address every night; to observe an electronically monitored curfew from 8pm to 8am, Monday to Friday; not to contact, directly or indirectly, two named prosecution witnesses — Steve Duggan and Frank Caughwell; and not to come within one mile of Stockport Town Hall, Stockport police station, or solicitors’ offices, without a prior written appointment.
That last condition is worth pausing on. This series has already documented, in detail, an exclusion from the Town Hall building itself. A bail condition excluding him from a full mile around it — encompassing, in a town the size of Stockport, a meaningful part of the town centre — is a considerably broader restriction than “don’t go inside.”
The Same Two Names
The two named witnesses on this bail document are not new to this series. “Frank Caughwell” is, allowing for a variant spelling, the same “Frank” whose jacket a security guard confirmed — in the notebook entry examined in Part Twelve — had merely been sprayed by a sneeze. And “Steve Duggan” matches the same “Steve” who delivered that admission to Mr Parnell on the Town Hall steps in December 2008, and who appears again in the Council’s own incident logs, called to reception to ask Mr Parnell to leave.
Put plainly: the bail conditions restricting Mr Parnell’s contact and movement, imposed by a Crown Court in September 2009, were built around protecting exactly the two individuals whose own accounts — by the security guard’s own admission, recorded contemporaneously and in writing — describe an incident amounting to nothing more than a sneeze.
A Sick Man, Processed Like Any Other
None of the prison paperwork here distinguishes Mr Parnell from any other person passing through the same system that week. That is, in one sense, exactly the point. The Council’s own case notes elsewhere in this series describe him as a designated vulnerable person; the custody log examined in Part Fourteen shows him in evident crisis within months of this same period. None of that context travels with a prisoner number and a barcode. The system that processed him into HMP Forest Bank on 14 September 2009 had no obvious way of knowing, or perhaps no mechanism for caring, that the man behind BN3845 was, by the account of almost everyone else in this file, gravely unwell and disputing claims that had already started to visibly unravel.
Mr Parnell recounted that he was treated well in prison. The prison officers and other prisoners felt that he shouldn’t be there. He also noted that several of the young men in Forest Bank were obviously innocent.
