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 The rest of us have to put up with ‘a creaking, outdated system’.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 fighting for justice on behalf of loved ones. Their campaigns do not have the critical mass of the Hillsborough campaign – they go it alone.
• • •
Much of this book was written in the year of the twentieth anniversary of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). The most concrete of 350-plus recommendations of the royal commission, set up on the day the Birmingham Six were released, was its proposal to create the first state-funded miscarriage of justice watchdog.
If you are in prison for a crime you have not committed, and you have unsuccessfully appealed, then your one and only chance of clearing your name resides with the Birmingham-based CCRC. It alone has the power to refer your case back to the Court of Appeal.
On average the CCRC receives 1,500 applications a year, mainly from prisoners. In the year of writing, the miscarriage watchdog referred just twelve cases back to the Court of Appeal.
The commission, oversubscribed and understaffed, is just another symptom of a failing criminal justice system. It is no coincidence that the system’s so-called safety net mechanism has suffered more under austerity than any other agency.
In 2016, the CCRC’s chair, Richard Foster, told MPs that for every £10 that his predecessor had to spend on a case a decade ago, he now had just £4. That represented the deepest cut that had taken place anywhere in the justice budget.
Almost as soon as the CCRC was set up, it was undermined: first by politicians and then by the Court of Appeal.
Many lawyers and academics would say that the Court of Appeal has changed little since those bad old days.
• • •
Guilty Until Proven Innocent is about miscarriages of justice (but not of Tony Blair’s kind). Each chapter starts with a different case of alleged wrongful conviction. The purpose of the book is to explore the common ground between the cases, all quite different and unique, in an attempt to shine light on why the criminal justice system keeps failing us.
This book is the work of a journalist, not an academic or a lawyer, although it is influenced by the debate in legal and academic circles. There is a small constituency of concern comprising lawyers, academics, journalists and campaigners that has mobilised around miscarriages of justice.
Many of them have written for the Justice Gap website, taken part in the House of Commons’ justice committee 2015 investigation into the CCRC, and are currently involved in the formation of the all-party parliamentary group on miscarriages of justice. I have been influenced by their work in writing this book (but the book is an entirely independent enterprise).
The book is not arranged thematically, but I examine the following big issues:
Prior to the CCRC, there were clear types of cases (terrorism, unreliable identifications, police misconduct etc.) that came to redefine in people’s minds what a ‘miscarriage of justice’ was.
Over the past twenty years there have been clear categories of miscarriages of justice (‘joint enterprise’ convictions, especially in the context of gang and knife crime, junk science cases and historical sexual abuse cases). But they are less well understood by the public.
As I said, each chapter features a different case. Each one is complex. They are not black and white. I attempt to write about the cases in a way that is fair to all sides. It does not help anyone to embellish the facts of a case and present it in a more positive light.
• • •
One day in March 2015, I found myself sitting in the lounge of a married couple. They had been through a hellish experience. The husband had spent twenty months in prison for crimes he always insisted he had never committed. He was convicted of offences relating to historical sexual abuse allegations. Miraculously, the couple had come out the other side intact.
On his first night in prison, the husband had contemplated taking his own life. He had a heart condition and had recently had a stent fitted in his upper thigh to regulate the flow of blood. He planned to take the plug out and ‘lie there; quietly bleeding to death’.
But, he insisted, he had had it easy compared to his wife. One day she was sitting outside school in her car, having just picked up their seven-year-old son. She was about to pull away from the kerb when the mother of one of her son’s friends came over. Her window was open and the woman punched her in the face. As she walked away, she keyed the side of her car. All the time, their son sat behind his mother with his seatbelt on.
Her husband is now a free man because of the hard work of a loving wife, who refused to give up despite what must have seemed an impossible fight. His conviction was quashed in the Court of Appeal.
As I sat down on their sofa, I placed my iPhone on the table ready to record. The interview had been cancelled and then rescheduled. The husband didn’t want to talk to the press. His wife believed it was important that they did. She wanted to tell other people in their position that they weren’t alone.
So I hit ‘record’. I sense there is something he wants to say before we start. There is. ‘As a society, we accept that there are miscarriages of justice and that there has to be collateral damage,’ he tells me. ‘For every eight people who get sent to prison in relation to these types of allegations, two might be innocent. They are the collateral damage.’
• • •
Over the past couple of years, there has been a surge of interest in the topic of miscarriages of justice. Curiously, this renewed interest has had nothing to do with the deepening crisis in the justice system, and everything to do with the success of American documentaries into cases of alleged wrongful conviction.
The best of these programmes was the Netflix hit Making a Murderer, which documented the plight of Steven Avery of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who spent eighteen years in prison for a sexual assault that he did not commit.¶ Two years after Avery’s release, and having just filed a $36 million lawsuit, he was arrested for murder. What followed over ten episodes was an unsparing dissection of what looks like some pretty rough justice. The two film-makers, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, spent ten years working on the series.
As you reach the climax of Avery’s story, one of his lawyers, the wise and eloquent Dean Strang, using words that resonate on this side of the Atlantic, delivers the following impromptu soliloquy on the limits of American justice:
Most of what ails our criminal justice system lies in an unwarranted certitude on the part of police officers, and prosecutors and defence lawyers, and judges and jurors, that they’re getting it right. That they’re simply right. It is just a tragic lack of humility.
This book is dedicated to our justice system’s collateral damage.
* In 2014, a cut of 8.75 per cent was imposed on the legal aid fees for criminal defence solicitors and a second equal-sized cut was put on hold.
† Michael Gove gave his first speech as Lord Chancellor at the Legatum Institute on 25 June 2015. He said: ‘I have seen both prosecution and defence barristers in a case that touched on an individual’s most precious rights acknowledge that each had only received the massive bundles in front of them hours before and – through no fault of their own – were very far from being able to make the best case possible.’ He was sacked from the post by Prime Minister Theresa May in July the following year.
‡The Liam Allan case is uncannily similar to the case of Elgan Varney (see Chapter Six).
§When asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 18 January 2018, the DPP Alison Saunders said: ‘I don’t think so because what these cases show is that when we take a case through to trial there are various safeguards in place, not least of which is the defence indicating what their defence is going to be.’
¶ The US podcast Serial, which narrated an unfolding investigation into the case of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, is the most popular podcast ever and is reckoned to have been downloaded 68 million times.