Brian Thornton, Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the 黑料社, explains why the Criminal Cases Review Commission is fatally flawed...
The body responsible for investigating miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has been plunged into crisis. The chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), Helen Pitcher, following about the way the commission had handled recent cases.
Most notably, the commission was criticised over the case of , who was wrongly convicted for rape and spent 17 years in prison. The CCRC twice rejected Malkinson’s submissions that he was innocent, and he was only cleared thanks to work by his own lawyers to track down DNA evidence that proved his innocence.
Malkinson said the CCRC .
Pitcher said that she had been made a scapegoat for the failings on the : “A head had to roll and I was chosen for that role,” she said. Pitcher was not in her post as chair when the CCRC rejected Malkinson’s first appeal. She rejected the findings of an independent panel that concluded her decisions, including not apologising promptly to Malkinson, had eroded confidence in the CCRC.
“I don’t know who or why anyone would want to take on the role, because you will be held accountable for previous miscarriages of justice,” Pitcher told the Times. “You will be expected to have known what was going on then. It’s just not possible.”
Malkinson described the commission as . And along with other critics, such as legal professionals, academics and campaigners, he believes the CCRC is no longer fit for purpose and should be dissolved.
Once a prisoner, who claims to be innocent, has exhausted all legal avenues they have no choice but to look beyond the court system for redress.
For most of the 20th century, the last chance saloon was located in the heart of government, in the Home Office. The home secretary had the power to send a case to the Court of Appeal .
This arrangement was doomed from the start. It made referrals political affairs – particularly in the context of the . It also put the home secretary in the firing line as investigative journalists uncovered miscarriages of justice.
Wrongly convicted...Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six
The relentless pressure for reform eventually came to a head in 1991, with the release of – six Irishmen who had been wrongly convicted of planting bombs in two Birmingham pubs in 1974 that killed 21 people and injured 182. Amid chaotic scenes outside the Old Bailey, Paddy Hill (), grabbed a microphone and unleashed a on the institutions that had taken his freedom:
For 16 and a half years we have been used as political scapegoats. The police told us from the start they knew we hadn’t done it. They told us they didn’t care who had done it. They told us that we were selected and they were going to frame us. Justice? I don’t think the people in there [the judiciary] have got the intelligence nor the honestly to spell the word, never mind dispense it. They’re rotten.
The growing crisis threatened the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system and the government had no option but to act. A was set up, and from it sprung a new body – the .
When it began work in 1997, the CCRC was the world’s first statutory, publicly-funded body responsible for . The at its disposal were impressive.
If a prisoner applied to the CCRC, claiming they were innocent, the commission could use these powers as part of a fresh investigation into the conviction. It could get information from the police and prosecutors, re-interview witnesses or find new ones, and order new DNA testing. If it found new evidence it could then refer a case back to the Court of Appeal.
It has had some successes. The commission was widely praised for the investigation into the case, where it uncovered fresh evidence that proved the young Londoner could not have committed the murder he was jailed for.
But while demand for its services is soaring, these successes have become rarer.
Last year the CCRC received a record-breaking from people claiming they were innocent, and referred 25 to the Court of Appeal. , describe it as chronically underfunded, reluctant to exercise its powers and subservient to the .
Prisoners and their lawyers say they are exasperated at the length of time the CCRC takes to look into their cases. But the real frustration is with the .
Critics point to cases such as , who spent an additional 10 years in prison because the CCRC refused to carry out DNA tests that would have proved his innocence. He applied to the CCRC twice but was rejected both times.
The then chair of the CCRC, Richard Foster, told Nealon: “We are doing what we can to prevent anything similar . But as the Malkinson case shows, the CCRC hasn’t really learned its lesson.
The body that was created to solve a crisis in public confidence is now facing its own . The CCRC needs – and not another career bureaucrat. The new chair, who is appointed by the king, must be someone who will oversee a culture of change in the organisation – dispelling the insipid timidity and transforming the CCRC into an organisation that pursues justice without fear or favour.
It must also be . The commission is now entirely incapable of properly investigating the huge number of cases it receives. The money involved is relatively small, but the impact on the wrongfully convicted and their families is immeasurable. found that the CCRC had suffered bigger cuts that any other part of the criminal justice system since 2010.
And finally, a key structural flaw must be fixed. The means that the CCRC will only refer a case if there is a real possibility that the Court of Appeal will quash the conviction.
But because the Court of Appeal will only overturn convictions it believes to be “unsafe”, the CCRC only concerns itself with safety or unsafety rather than guilt or innocence. From the perspective of the Court of Appeal, a conviction is safe if all the legal procedures (the arrest adhered to the guidelines, there were the correct number of jurors at the trial) have been followed. It has nothing to do with the factual guilt of the defendant.
This test . We cannot have a miscarriage of justice watchdog that cares more about procedure than innocence.
This article was first published in The Conversation. See more 黑料社 contributions at
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