Robins Guilty Until Proven Innocent

The Crisis in Our Justice System
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78590-390-8
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Whenever a miscarriage of justice hits the headlines, it is tempting to dismiss it as an anomaly - a minor hiccup in an otherwise healthy judicial system. Yet the cases of injustice that feature in this book reveal that they are not just minor hiccups, but symptoms of a chronic illness plaguing the British legal system. Massive underfunding, catastrophic failures in policing and shoddy legal representation have all contributed to a deepening crisis - one that the watchdog set up for the very purpose of investigating miscarriages of justice has done precious little to remedy. Indeed, little has changed since the 'bad old days' of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Award winning journalist Jon Robins lifts the lid on Britain's legal scandals and exposes the disturbing complacency that has led to many innocent people being deemed guilty, either in the eyes of the law or in the court of public opinion.

Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and author. He writes regularly for the Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Express and Sunday Express. He also runs the Justice Gap (www.thejusticegap.com) - an award-winning online magazine aimed at the public about 'law and justice - and the difference between the two'. He has won the Bar Council's legal journalist of the year twice and was shortlisted for last year's Criminal Justice Alliance awards.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robins, Jon

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION
When a miscarriage of justice case hits the headlines, it is easy to dismiss it as a shocking one-off aberration – a minor hiccup in a system that otherwise functions in an exemplary fashion. After all, we are told by politicians and lawyers that our criminal justice system is the finest in the world. In reality, our justice system is in a state of permanent crisis. Our dilapidated courts are falling apart. It’s not just that paint peels off the courtroom walls and the roofs leak; inefficiency has become endemic. More than half of criminal trials in this country have to be called off or rescheduled. In 2015, some 1,200 Crown Court trials were unable to start as scheduled because the private companies contracted to escort prisoners to court failed to deliver the defendants on time. According to the spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, the Crown Prosecution Service spent £21.5 million that year on preparing for cases that were never heard. Austerity has hit the criminal justice system hard. The Ministry of Justice’s budget, which covers prisons, probation and the legal aid system, will have been slashed by 40 per cent since the coalition government came to power in 2010 by the end of the decade. That is a cut from £9.3 billion in 2010/11 to a predicted £5.6 billion by 2019/20. Legal aid lawyers, derided in the press as ‘fat cats’, have not had an increase in their fees for twenty years. It is a measure of the disdain in which the rights of defendants are held that the coalition government threatened to impose a 17.5 per cent cut in legal aid rates. Where else do we see cuts on that scale?* Our courts operate on a ‘two-nation’ system. There is ‘the wealthy, international class’ who opt to settle their cases in London with its ‘gold standard of British justice’. And then there is everyone else. The rest of us have to put up with ‘a creaking, outdated system’. That is not the confected outrage of some vested interest with an axe to grind. It is the assessment of a recent Lord Chancellor. ‘I have heard too many accounts of cases derailed by the late arrival of prisoners, broken video links or missing paperwork,’ said Michael Gove in 2015, in his first speech as Lord Chancellor. The politician observed for himself lawyers arriving in court with their huge bundles of paper, describing the large stacks with typical flourish as ‘snowdrifts of paper held in place by delicate pink ribbons’, and wondered what century our courts were living in.† Gove did not last long in the post. Lord Chancellors don’t these days. There have been six in the past six years. The problems that he rightly identified, however, have only got worse. At the same time as this impoverishment, the criminal justice pendulum has swung dramatically in the direction of victims’ rights and away from the rights of defendants. Successive governments have bought into Tony Blair’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ mantra. ‘Some of our reforms will be controversial,’ Tony Blair told Labour Party conference delegates in 2002, ahead of the launch of his criminal justice White Paper. The then Prime Minister promised to ‘rebalance’ our justice system, so that the rights of suspects did not outweigh the rights of ‘the law-abiding majority’. In his conference speech, Blair sought to redefine what we understand by ‘miscarriages of justice’. Perhaps, he suggested to the party faithful, ‘the biggest miscarriage of justice’ in today’s system is ‘when the guilty walk away unpunished’. Of course, Tony Blair’s speech was not controversial in the slightest. It now takes a brave politician to speak out in defence of the rights of defendants in this climate. At the start of 2018, a series of high-profile rape cases collapsed over a two-month period because of failures to disclose evidence. In the high-profile case of Liam Allan, the police had downloaded 40,000 text and WhatsApp messages from the woman’s phone. Allan’s lawyers had repeatedly asked for the data to be handed over to them before the trial. Instead, they were assured there was nothing to disclose. The messages were finally released three days into Allan’s trial. This wealth of evidence revealed that his accuser had pursued the 22-year-old psychology student for (her words) ‘casual sex’. A miscarriage of justice was narrowly avoided. Allan had been on bail for nearly two years. It was the prosecution counsel who insisted on the defence seeing all the evidence three days into the trial at Croydon Crown Court. ‘The system nearly failed,’ the barrister said. ‘This is a criminal justice system which is not just creaking, it’s about to croak.’ As a result of this and a run of similarly collapsed cases, the Metropolitan Police drafted in more than 100 officers to review 600 rape and sexual assault cases. An unreserved apology has been extended to Allan. This is not a one-off.‡ The number of prosecutions in England and Wales that have collapsed due to a failure by police or prosecutors to disclose evidence has increased by 70 per cent in the past two years. Meanwhile, the miscarriage of justice watchdog reports that failures in disclosure are the biggest cause of wrongful convictions. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, was asked if it was possible that there were people in prison today because of failures of disclosures. Apparently, there is nothing to worry about.§ • • • On 14 March 1991, Paddy Hill, Hugh Callaghan, Richard McIlkenny, Gerry Hunter, Billy Power and Johnny Walker left the Old Bailey. They were finally free, having spent sixteen years behind bars after their convictions for the murder of twenty-one people, as a result of bombs placed in two Birmingham pubs in November 1974, were overturned. Set up on the very day that the so-called Birmingham Six were released, a royal commission was tasked with repairing the battered reputation of British justice. That scandal had exposed a mindset at the top of the judiciary that valued maintaining the appearance of integrity over the lives of individuals destroyed in the rush to judgment. It was a view most infamously articulated by Lord Denning. Then Master of the Rolls, Denning ruled in 1980 that there would be no further appeals in the Birmingham Six case. ‘If they won,’ he said, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say: ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’ It was a position that Denning did not resile from even in retirement. Historian A. N. Wilson asked him in 1990 whether he was glad that the death penalty had been scrapped. ‘Not really,’ the esteemed judge replied. ‘It ought to be retained for murder most foul. We shouldn’t have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they’d been hanged. They’d have been forgotten, and the whole community would have been satisfied.’ All ‘systems’ make mistakes. No sensible person would be surprised that one so complex, chronically underfunded and dependent on other autonomous but similarly cash-starved agencies as British justice would from time to time err. A willingness to acknowledge fallibility, as well as being the decent and humane thing to do, is the right thing to do. From the Birmingham Six to the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium tragedy, extreme institutional denial of the justice system has done more to undermine public confidence than the begrudging confirmation that the police really did beat confessions out of innocent Irish men or, in the case of Hillsborough, falsely made out grieving football fans to be drunken, ticketless louts who invited tragedy upon themselves. It took the Hillsborough families twenty-eight years to get their measure of justice in the form of the 2016 inquests, which ruled that the ninety-six fans were ‘unlawfully killed’. Like many people, all these years later, I can still recall the moment I first saw those distressing television images of Hillsborough stadium on the afternoon of Saturday 15 April 1989. I come from a family of Liverpool FC fans. My father and brother were both at the match. My mother and I endured a long wait before discovering that they were OK. Then there was further anxiety until we heard news about my brother’s friend, who had travelled with them. Ray was one of the lucky ones. He managed to extricate himself from the Lepping Lane stand and climbed over the fencing to the adjoining pens. On 29 September 2016, I interviewed Margaret Aspinall, chair of the Hillsborough family support group at Liverpool FC’s ground. Her eighteen-year-old son James died in the stadium disaster. ‘Even now it feels raw,’ she told me. ‘He goes off to a football game and he comes back five days later in a coffin. You need answers.’ In the background as we spoke, the Kop boomed out ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. It was playing on a fifteen-minute loop over the Anfield speaker system, for the benefit of fans from all over the world who were touring the hallowed ground. The Hillsborough families had a community behind them. ‘That is why we have to try and change things,’ Margaret Aspinall told me. ‘No parent should have to go through what we did alone.’ There are many families out there...