Miscarriages ofJustice
Mistakes are a common occurrence every day for many people. These mistakes can be tiny, like putting the remote control in the fridge, and will have no real effect or impact on the individual making them or they can be serious mistakes, like providing false testimony in a court case, and these will have a detrimental impact to all those involved. In the criminal justice system any mistakes can have extreme consequences and can cost an innocent person their freedom and in the past their lives. This is called a miscarriage of justice. The purpose of this paper is to look at one miscarriage of justice case and provide a critique of the issues present in this case. It will begin with a brief definition of what is meant by the term miscarriage of justice and how these can occur. Following this will be a summary of the chosen case, highlighting the issues that led to this miscarriage of justice. Finally, it will look in more detail at these issues, how they arose and how they can be prevented from happening in the future.
A miscarriage of justice, sometimes called a wrongful conviction, can be defined as ‘a failure to achieve justice’ (Oxford Dictionaries, 2018) and relates to ‘a person being punished by the law, in court, for a crime they have not committed’ (Cambridge Dictionary, 2018). Over the years there have been a number of high profile cases involving miscarriages of justice, such as; the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, Stefan Kiszko, Barry George, Suzanne Holdsworth, Angela Cannings and many more. In these cases, the individuals involved spent time in prison, often many years. Every prison in the UK will have prisoners claiming to be innocent and a victim of a miscarriage of justice, but until they have lodged a successful appeal against their conviction they will remain an alleged victim of a miscarriage of justice (Naughton, 2006).
In order to claim a miscarriage of justice the individual must lodge an appeal against their conviction. In most cases this appeal will be unsuccessful and at this point the case will be referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) who since their introduction in 1997 have referred 650 cases, of the 630 appeals heard by the courts 422 appeals have been allowed and 195 have been dismissed. Once referred to the CCRC they will investigate and if there is new evidence that could prove the wrongly convicted party innocent, or a belief that a second appeal could be successful then the case will be referred back to the court for a retrial of sorts (CCRC, 2018). Miscarriages of justice can arise for a number of reasons, including; the police failing to carry out a thorough investigation; the CPS incompetently preparing the prosecution’s case; poor legal representation from either the defence or the prosecution; and questionable expert testimony (Samuels, 2009, and Savage and Milne, cited in Newburn etal., 201 1).