PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The last time Americans took such an interest in the British justice system was with the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, all of whom, of course, went on to be acquitted. These cases helped to bring widespread awareness that the criminal justice system was convicting innocent people and then failing to provide the necessary mechanisms for them to overturn those convictions. On the day the Birmingham Six were freed, the then government set up a Royal Commission which recommended the establishment of the CCRC. Can we be sure that the New Yorker is not on to something with the Letby and Bamber cases, too? An appeal by Letby, who has always claimed to be innocent, has been rejected by the Court of Appeal, despite the fact that no defence experts appeared at her trial to counter the prosecution witnesses.
The CCRC is now her only recourse.
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STORY: "Is the CCRC fit to decide on Lucy Letby’s appeal?" by Michael Naughton, published by The Spectator, on August 24, 2024. ((Dr Naughton is the founder and director of Empowering the Innocent and a professor at Bristol University.)
GIST: "Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error?
Why did human rights organisations such as Liberty and Justice stop campaigning on behalf of UK prisoners wrongfully jailed?
Why are there fewer MPs plugging away on behalf of constituents they believe to have been victims of miscarriages of justice?
All this activity seemed to be wound down after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) began its work in 1997.
Outsiders were no longer needed to look into the criminal justice system, many believed, now that we had a one-stop shop for prisoners protesting against their convictions for crimes they insist they did not commit.
Miscarriages of justice where the fault may lie in the misinterpretation of evidence are not to be considered
It comes as something of a novelty, then, to find the New Yorker suddenly questioning the safety of the convictions of two of Britain’s most high-profile prisoners.
In quick succession in recent months, the US magazine has published in-depth inquiries into the case of Lucy Letby, convicted for the murder of seven babies and for attempting to kill a further seven, and that of Jeremy Bamber, convicted in October 1986 for the murders of his adoptive parents, Nevill and June Bamber, his adoptive sister, Sheila Caffell, and Sheila’s six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas.
Both articles raised significant questions about the reliability of the evidence at their trials and the justness of their convictions.
Letby and Bamber were each given whole-life tariffs and will die in prison unless they are able to overturn their convictions at the Court of Appeal.
The last time Americans took such an interest in the British justice system was with the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, all of whom, of course, went on to be acquitted.
These cases helped to bring widespread awareness that the criminal justice system was convicting innocent people and then failing to provide the necessary mechanisms for them to overturn those convictions.
On the day the Birmingham Six were freed, the then government set up a Royal Commission which recommended the establishment of the CCRC. Can we be sure that the New Yorker is not on to something with the Letby and Bamber cases, too?
An appeal by Letby, who has always claimed to be innocent, has been rejected by the Court of Appeal, despite the fact that no defence experts appeared at her trial to counter the prosecution witnesses.
The CCRC is now her only recourse.
Bamber, who has been imprisoned for almost 39 years while maintaining his innocence, has also failed in his appeal and has been rejected twice so far by the CCRC – although it is currently reviewing his third application, submitted in March 2021.
We should not be confident that either will receive a fair hearing.
The CCRC is not the solution to the problem of wrongful conviction that it was hoped it would be, and that many still believe it to be.
On the contrary, it has failed in many cases, with innocent people languishing in prison for years as a result.
The body is claimed to be independent of both the government and the courts, yet that is not really the case.
The crux of the problem is section 13 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 – the legislation that brought the CCRC to life – which introduces the concept of the ‘real possibility test’.
This stipulates that the CCRC can only refer cases back to the appeal courts if it is felt that the conviction has a ‘real possibility’ of not being upheld.
Caseworkers are also instructed only to consider evidence that is ‘fresh’ – understood, generally, to be evidence or argument that was not available at the time of the original trial.
They cannot, in other words, consider possible miscarriages of justice where the fault may lie in the misinterpretation of existing evidence.
So CCRC reviews are for the most part mere desktop assessments of whether cases might contain any so-called ‘fresh’ evidence.
As a result, it refers very few cases to the Court of Appeal.
Between April 1997 and June this year, it referred just 2.6 per cent of the 31,998 applications it received and just 1.8 per cent resulted in a successful appeal.
This figure reduces significantly, however, when it is restricted to convictions for serious criminal offences given in the Crown Court, and excludes parking tickets, dangerous dog and immigration cases.
When innocent victims are wrongly convicted, they and their families will never give up their pursuit of justice
The UK public’s relaxed confidence in our criminal justice system contrasts to the situation in the US, where the wrongful conviction of innocent victims is a major cause of public concern.
There is an ongoing debate about whether the US should set up its own CCRC on a federal level, yet the US is arguably more effective at sniffing out miscarriages of justice already.
Public awareness of injustice has been fostered over the past three decades by the exponential growth of the ‘Innocence Project’ movement.
This has strengthened a cultural consciousness that will simply not accept the containment or state-sanctioned execution of innocent victims of wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
Currently, there are 59 US-based organisations affiliated with an umbrella organisation called the Innocence Network.
Most of these provide legal representation to people who say that they have been wrongfully convicted
. In 2022 alone, there were 253 exonerations in the US, according to the National Registry of Exonerations – a body which, as its name suggests, records cases in which an individual was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all charges.
It was in recognition of the fact that the CCRC can and does fail innocent applicants that I established a British version – Innocence Network UK (INUK) – in 2004.
This spawned more than 30 innocence projects in universities around the UK.
In 2011, INUK published a dossier of 44 cases where alleged innocent victims of wrongful convictions had been rejected by the CCRC, not because a reasoned analysis of the evidence had rejected the possibility that they might be innocent, but because they were deemed not to fulfil the real possibility test.
Although the dossier was reported in the Guardian, it hardly dented the general belief that miscarriages of justice are a thing of the past.
But timing is crucial, and things look as if they are improving for innocent victims of wrongful convictions.
This is partly thanks to the case of Andrew Malkinson, wrongly convicted of rape and given a seven-year prison sentence.
In the event, he ended up spending 17 years in jail because he wouldn’t admit guilt for a crime he did not commit.
In that time, Malkinson was twice rejected by the CCRC.
He was, however, assisted by the organisation Appeal, set up by Emily Bolton, former director of Innocence Project New Orleans in the US, which obtained DNA evidence to prove that Malkinson was innocent.
The CCRC could have found that DNA evidence for itself.
Then there is the recent ITV drama series Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which finally brought deserved public attention to the Post Office scandal which saw more than 900 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses wrongly convicted between 1999 and 2015 due to faulty Horizon accounting software provided by Fujitsu.
An ongoing series of articles in the Daily Mail has brought to light the case of Clive Freeman, convicted in May 1989 at the Old Bailey for the murder of Alexander Hardie, who likely died of natural causes.
Currently in his 36th year of incarceration – 23 years past tariff, because he, too, will not admit his guilt for a murder that he says he did not commit – Freeman has so far had four applications rejected by the CCRC.
The commission is reviewing his fifth application.
When innocent victims are wrongly convicted, they and their families will never give up their pursuit of justice, no matter how many times the CCRC refuses to refer their cases.
This is as true today as it was when the cases of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were rejected by the Court of Appeal.
Another pertinent example is the case of Robin Garbutt, currently in his 14th year in prison for the murder of his wife, Diana Garbutt.
Garbutt’s claim of innocence, which has featured in almost all mainstream media newspapers in Britain this year alone, also hinges on the now discredited Horizon system at the centre – the Garbutts were sub-postmasters, and evidence from their branch’s computers was used to convict Robin.
He is finalising a fourth application to the CCRC.
In the face of mounting criticism, the CCRC’s role in the Malkinson case was recently reviewed by Chris Henley KC.
When Henley reported last month, he concluded that Malkinson could have been freed after five years had the CCRC done its job properly. Malkinson did not fit the description of the attacker given by the victim, nor did he bear any sign of the scratch which she said she had given her attacker.
Moreover, there was the DNA evidence that pointed to his innocence.
The Henley Review might have gone even further if it had not been paid for, and had its terms of reference determined by, the CCRC.
In spite of its findings, the review is best seen as a partisan defence of the CCRC’s ‘real possibility test’ for judging whether appeals should be allowed.
It will do nothing to prevent the tsunami of wrongful conviction cases crashing down on it.
This failed body should not be allowed to continue to have a monopoly on the serious business of uncovering miscarriages of justice."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-the-ccrc-fit-to-decide-on-lucy-letbys-appeal/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
- SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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