Few cases in recent decades have provoked such public revulsion as the murder of the Doyle family in 1984, killed as they slept over a turf war about the route of the family ice cream van.

The so called 'ice cream wars' were nothing to do with ice cream and everything to do with the interests of criminals.

The sight of the coffins of the Doyle family in an east end church in Glasgow is one of those television images that will never leave those who viewed it.

It would start a chain of events that would see two men - Joe Steele and Thomas Campbell - serve 18 years for a crime they did not commit and shine a light on uncomfortable debates about police corruption and the inflexibility of the criminal justice system in dealing with alleged miscarriages of justice.

The death of one of those wrongly accused men - Campbell - was confirmed on Wednesday.

There is one important legacy of this case that is worth highlighting. Although it was not the direct catalyst for the creation of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), the avalanche of publicity on the plight of Campbell and Steele led MPs to ask if the system for dealing with miscarriages of justice was fit for purpose.

An independent review chaired by the late Lord Stewart Sutherland concluded the system was not fit. The SCCRC was born.

I was one of only two non-lawyers to give evidence to the Sutherland Committee. The other, Dr Jim MacGregor, a GP who worked at Glenochil jail, had taken up the plight of Plean man Stuart Gair who was convicted of the murder of a man in a Glasgow lane in 1989.

Gair had been framed by corrupt police officers and evidence was extorted from his co-accused to give an incriminating account which was consistent with the bent narrative the CID had decided was necessary to send Gair down.

STV made two documentaries on the Gair case having previously made a compelling programme on the Steele and Campbell case.

Prior to 1999, having a murder conviction quashed in Scotland was rare. The Secretary of State for Scotland had the power to refer a case to the Court of Criminal Appeal. To win referral new evidence was necessary but the definition of what constituted new evidence was so restrictive that most appeals were doomed.

The SCCRC took a more liberal approach, the narrow restrictions on fresh evidence were widened and as a consequence appeals started to succeed. Steele and Campbell had their convictions quashed in 2004, Stuart Gair in 2006.

Thomas Campbell and Joseph Steel's case more than any other made reform possible. Questions that wouldn't go away required an answer and the SCCRC was in part an attempt to address the questions that the case of the Glasgow two raised.