MOJUK: Newsletter �Inside Out� No 58

'Hostages' are Victims too!

"the home secretary, when he talks of wanting to "rebalance the criminal justice system in favour of the victim", has to remember that sometimes the "victims" are those who are wrongly charged with crimes they did not commit in a bid to satisfy a demand for convictions." "justice for all has to mean justice also for all those who are rounded up in the wake of a crime."

Justice delayed

The quashing of the torso murder convictions is a timely reminder that defendants can be victims too Duncan Campbell. Friday July 19, 2002, The Guardian

The decision of the court of appeal to quash the conviction of Reg Dudley and Bob Maynard for two murders that took place more than quarter of century ago has a significance far beyond the courtroom and the north London pubs where the news would have been celebrated on Tuesday night. It is either appropriate or ironic, depending on your views on the criminal justice system, that the successful appeal should occur in the week in which the government published its Justice for All white paper.

Justice for all is a fine ambition. But the home secretary, when he talks of wanting to "rebalance the criminal justice system in favour of the victim", has to remember that sometimes the "victims" are those who are wrongly charged with crimes they did not commit in a bid to satisfy a demand for convictions.

It was as a result of an unspoken notion of justice for some that the two men were convicted at the Old Bailey. It was the 1970s and a time of great assumptions: assumptions that Irishmen with republican links who were arrested and charged with offences must be guilty; and assumptions that, if detectives told the court that the people in the dock had made a helpful confession, then those detectives were surely telling the truth.

There was also an unspoken belief that too many career criminals were getting away, if not with murder, then with serious crimes. This was used to justify a modus operandi that could be summarised as "we think you did it but we can't prove it so we'll massage the evidence". Why bother continuing an investigation when you could create your own "evidence"? The "verballing" of criminals - attributing compromising words to them that they did not say - became a routine practice. This was often justified as a desire to bring justice for all victims.

Then gradually, through the 1980s and 1990s, the sight of gaunt and angry people standing on the steps of the royal courts of justice in the Strand became a familiar one as more and more cases of miscarriage of justice emerged. The tide turned, jurors became more sceptical. Laws of evidence changed. It was no longer so easy to "fit up" defendants. Sir Robert Mark had already started the process of removing the hundreds of corrupt officers who had lined their pockets in the 1960s and 1970s but the increasing evidence that people had been wrongly convicted undermined the whole system; honest detectives found themselves having to deal with the legacy of their dishonest predecessors.

And that is why this week's appeal court decision is important. For more than 20 years, there has been evidence that Dudley and Maynard should not have been convicted. The man who helped convict them all those years ago was saying as early as 1980 that he had fabricated his evidence, yet it was another two decades before he was offered immunity from prosecution for perjury so that he could finally tell the truth. In the meantime, Maynard and Dudley were left to linger behind bars. Many within the police and the Home Office must have been aware of the injustice of this, yet the papers that would have cleared the men were shuffled or "lost".

Their conviction could have been quashed in the 1980s and would by now have been long forgotten except by the participants. Instead, it was allowed to fester so that once again, as details of what happened emerges, the police will be portrayed in a damaging light: one of the grounds of the appeal was that a "confession" taken down in longhand could not have been written in the time claimed. Once again the public will be made aware of police malpractice and once again the police will have to deal with the scepticism that this provokes.

Another reason this case is important is that it finally made it to the court of appeal only after it had been reinvestigated by the criminal cases review commission, the body that was set up in the 1990s to investigate such claims. If the CCRC had not become involved and discovered the timing discrepancies of the note-taking, Maynard and Dudley would never have had their convictions overturned. There are still many wrongly convicted people in jail and the longer they remain there the greater the damage to the criminal justice system.

"It cost my marriage. I lost my son's growing up," Bob Maynard said on Tuesday after the court had finally granted the appeal. "There are no ups, it's all down. If they were to say you've got �2m compensation or your life back, I want my life back."

Sadly, courts of appeal cannot restore lost years. It has been a long, long haul for Bob Maynard and Reg Dudley because all that time ago the police decided to take some shocking short cuts to try and convict them. In a desire to bring justice to victims, justice for all has to mean justice also for all those who are rounded up in the wake of a crime.

� Duncan Campbell is a former Guardian crime correspondent and covered the original trial

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"wrongful criminal convictions are a normal, everyday feature of the criminal justice system - the system doesn't just sometimes get it wrong, it gets it wrong everyday, of every week, of every month of every year."

"If we pay more attention to these routinely quashed convictions, we find a scale of miscarriage of justice to fundamentally challenges any notion that the current system of criminal justice is weighted too much in favour of the defendant."

"successful appeals against criminal conviction show that in the decade 1989-1999 the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) abated over 8,470 criminal convictions - a yearly average of 770. In addition, there are around 3,500 quashed criminal convictions a year at the Crown Court for convictions obtained at the magistrates' courts.�

The Scales of Injustice

Miscarriages of justice are an everyday occurrence. As the government plans a thorough overhaul of criminal justice, it needs to ask why so many unsafe convictions are overturned. The wrongly convicted are victims too.

The government's criminal justice reforms, proposed in the recently published White Paper, are based on a 'single clear priority' to 'rebalance' the criminal justice system 'in favour of the victims of crime' and to 'bring more offenders to justice'. The explicit goal is to make it easier for the prosecution to secure guilty verdicts and to convict more people. This would seem to be at odds with the reality of criminal justice in England and Wales. The prison population stands at an all time high of over 70 thousand and the prosecution already achieves the conviction of over 95 per cent of defendants at magistrates' courts and 87 per cent of defendants in the Crown Court.

The White Paper seems to be to forget that that not all of those brought to trial will be guilty. A reform agenda framed in a language of 'putting the victim first' overlooks the fact that there are many victims of the present criminal justice system. Any human system can make mistakes, and that miscarriages of justice can and do occur. But, just how many miscarriages of justice victims of the present system are there?

We tend to think about miscarriages of justice as rare and exceptional occurrences. Prominent cases such as the Birmingham six, Guildford Four, Bridgewater four, M25 three, Cardiff three, Stephen Downing, and so on create the impression that miscarriages of justice are seen as very much an intermittent, high profile and small scale problem; that there are very few victims in the context of the statistics of all criminal convictions. But there are many more cases than those which receive prominent coverage in the media. Those cases of criminal conviction that are routinely quashed by the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division), or by the Crown Court for convictions previously obtained in the magistrates' court have received no attention at all.

If we pay more attention to these routinely quashed convictions, we find a scale of miscarriage of justice to fundamentally challenges any notion that the current system of criminal justice is weighted too much in favour of the defendant. The Lord Chancellor's Department's statistics on successful appeals against criminal conviction show that in the decade 1989-1999 the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) abated over 8,470 criminal convictions - a yearly average of 770. In addition, there are around 3,500 quashed criminal convictions a year at the Crown Court for convictions obtained at the magistrates' courts. Contrary to popular perceptions, then, wrongful criminal convictions are a normal, everyday feature of the criminal justice system - the system doesn't just sometimes get it wrong, it gets it wrong everyday, of every week, of every month of every year. With the result that thousands of innocent people experience a whole variety of harmful consequences that wrongful criminal convictions engender.

Justice for All also states that there is an 'absolute determination to create a system that meets the needs of society', 'wins the trust of citizens' and 'acquits the innocent'. Accordingly, the government might think about proposing reforms that would counter the causes of the thousands of routine wrongful criminal convictions that occur each year under the present criminal justice system. These (still) include misdirection by judges which is the most common cause of routine successful appeals; unreliable confessions such as in the cases of Robert Downing, the Cardiff Newsagent three, Andrew Evans, and King and Waugh who between them spent almost a century of wrongful imprisonment based on the unreliable confessions of the vulnerable.

Financial and other incentives which created unreliable 'cell confession evidence' that featured most recently in the case of Reg Dudley and Robert Maynard who each served over 20 years of wrongful imprisonment as a consequence of a 'bargain' between the police and an informant who received a reduced sentence for his part in a robbery in exchange for the necessary evidence for conviction; non-disclosure of vital evidence as in the case of John Kamara who also spent 20 years of wrongful imprisonment because over 200 statements were withheld from his defence team; malicious accusations such as in the case of Roy Burnett who spent 15 years of wrongful imprisonment for a rape that the Court of Appeal said 'almost certainly never happened', or Roger Beardmore who spent three years in prison (of a nine year sentence) for the paedophile rape of a young girl who later admitted that she had lied to get her mother's attention; badly conducted defences such as in the case of Mark Day who was convicted for murder with two others despite the fact that he did not know his co-defendants, a fact that his defence failed to bring to the court's attention; and, 'racism' such as in the case of the M25 three, the case in which three black men were wrongly imprisoned for 10 years despite the fact that witnesses had claimed that two of the offenders were white and four of six victims had referred to at least one of the offenders as white. And this is by no means exhaustive list of the causes of injustice.

When thinking about proposing reforms of the criminal justice system to reduce the conviction of the innocent it might also be pertinent to include some of the possible causes of miscarriages of justice that might never feature in the official statistics of successful appeals. Likely candidates include the 'time loss rule', under which when the wrongly imprisoned apply for an appeal they are advised that if their appeal is ultimately unsuccessful it could result in substantial increases to their sentence. The effect of this is to transform what was intended as a minor check on groundless applications into a major barrier in some meritorious cases. There are also the miscarriages of justice that can result from charge, plea and sentence 'bargaining' and the 'parole deal'. All of these induce innocent people to plead guilty to criminal offences that they have not committed and present a 'dark figure' of miscarriages of justice that can never be fully quantified.

It is clear that the present system of criminal justice is, indeed, in urgent need of reform. But this should not be in the direction of a relaxation of the system in favour of obtaining more guilty verdicts and convicting more people. Rather, the present system needs to a reformed in the direction of 're-balancing' it with its stated aims, namely, to safeguard against convicting of the innocent. The present system makes far too many mistakes. Convicting more of those brought to trial will undoubtedly mean making even more mistakes and convicting even more innocent victims.

Michael Naughton is a postgraduate researcher looking at the harmful consequences of miscarriages of justice in the Department of Sociology, University of Bristol.

The Observer Crime and Justice debate - Michael Naughton, Sunday July 28, 2002

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Convicted rapists to get cases reviewed By Frances Gibb, Legal Editor, The Times

Scores of sex offence cases are under review, the legal watchdog on miscarriages of justice said yesterday.

The CCRC has set up a working party to look for possible flaws in convictions for rape and child abuse cases where there has been little or no "objective evidence".

The cases likely to be reviewed include those involving the victim's word against that of the defendant.

The organisation said that its findings could help police to conduct inquiries into allegations of sex abuse and help its own investigators review convictions for sex offences.

Speaking at the launch of the commission's annual report its legal adviser, John Wagstaff, said that about 30 per cent of cases related to sex offences. He said: "There may well be miscarriages of justice. . . where, with very little corroboration, one person's view has been taken against another's."

Mr Wagstaff said that the commission wanted to see if patterns existed, for example, whether social services had held files on alleged victims.

The annual report revealed that the number of outstanding applications from criminals wanting their convictions and sentences reviewed has been cut by nearly three quarters over the last three years.

There were 338 cases waiting for review as of March 31 this year, compared with a peak of 1,208 in May 1999.

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Prison suicides up 40% in 2002

44 inmates have killed themselves so far this year

Prison suicides have risen by more than 40% in the first six months of 2002, government figures have revealed.

Attempted suicides and self-harm incidents in HM Prisons have also gone up by a third for the same period, Home Office minister Lord Falconer said in a Lords written reply.

The minister said there were 31 suicides in the first half of 2001 (January to June), compared with 44 in 2002 up to 5 July.

Jail suicides

Jan-Jul 2002: 44

Jul-Dec 2001: 42

Jan-Jun 2001: 31

Jul-Dec 2000: 30

There were also 42 suicides in the second half of 2001 compared with 39 for the same period in 2000.

Self-harm incidents and attempted suicides numbered 4,524 for the first half of 2002 up to 5 July, as against 3,307 for the first six months of 2001.

Such incidents numbered 2,762 in the second half of 2000 and jumped to 4,179 for the period July to December in 2001.

The minister said the Prison Service made no distinction between self-harm incidents and attempted suicides in their reporting.

There have been concerns that the weight of numbers in the jail system is affecting inmates' well-being.

Attempted suicides/self-harm

Jan-Jul 2002: 4,524

Jul-Dec 2001: 4,179

Jan-Jun 2001: 3,307

Jul-Dec 2000: 2,762

The numbers of inmates in England and Wales reached a record 71,341 earlier this month, a rise of more than 25,000 in 10 years.

A recent survey of prison boards of visitors said 18 prisons had returned to "degrading and inhumane" prison conditions caused by cell sharing and excessive time locked up.

Eleven boards were concerned about damage to mental health, increased self harm and suicide. BBC News Online Wednesday, 17 July, 2002

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Female Prisoners

House of Commons, Westminster Hall, Wednesday 10 July 2002

Extracts on debate on 'Female Prisoners'

Claire Ward: I want to draw attention to those people who are among the most socially excluded in our society�girls and young women from disadvantaged, deprived and depressed environments who become victims under our criminal justice system. I do not condone the crimes that they commit, be they shoplifting, robbery or serious assault, or query why they are being punished, but I question the response of a criminal justice system, which takes vulnerable children�as many of them are�and puts them in prison, which cannot possibly meet their needs or help them to build a better life.

The state has provided a limited number of penal establishments for women because so few women, especially young girls, commit crimes that require custodial sentences. Consequently, women prisoners tend to end up further away from their families and homes than male prisoners. They suffer much greater isolation in custody because access to their families may be more restricted. It is worth noting that more than half of the women in our prisons have children, who are often left behind when their main carer is taken into custody.

Women prisoners tend to display more symptoms of depression and mental health problems. Many suffer from mental illness. Self harm or cutting up is fairly common among women prisoners, but few prisons can cope with it. Such women need help, not incarceration. Their crimes are often the result of their mental instability. In addition to mental health problems, women prisoners show high levels of drink and drug dependency.

The Youth Justice Board designated 12 places at Eastwood Park prison to hold girls under 18 years of age. Inspectors describe that prison as an establishment in crisis. In one month, there had been 47 cases of self harm and more than 50 cases of people having been identified as at risk from suicide. Despite the commitment and dedication of the staff, few were qualified to deal with young girls or with the high levels of mental illness and vulnerability that are so common in women's prisons.

The inspectors met all 12 girls under the age of 18 at Eastwood Park and concluded: "It was impossible not to be struck by the profound personality disturbance and mental health problems that many presented and by the inappropriateness of prison, or indeed any other custodial placement for them."

On 14 December 1999, the Minister then responsible for prisons, my right hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng), now Chief Secretary to the Treasury, reiterated a previous commitment made by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary that from

"April 2000, 15 and 16 year old girls will be placed in local authority care, not in prison. In the longer term sentenced young women aged 17 will also be placed outside Prison Service custody."

That commitment was reinforced by the Youth Justice Board's plan to make it a priority to place all young women outside adult prisons by mid-2002.

The latest Home Office figures for May this year suggest that that has not yet happened: eight female 15-year-olds, 29 16-year-olds and 81 17-year-olds were being held in prison. Indeed, since 1999, the number of girls aged under 18 in prison has risen, from 86 to 120 this year. The rise in custodial sentences should be contrasted with the fall in recorded crimes committed by 15 to 17-year-old girls. By continuing the practice of holding juveniles with adults in adult prisons, the Government breach the UN convention on the rights of the child. That cannot be right.

Jean Corston: In concluding my remarks, I quote from this year's prisons handbook an article headed, "Viewpoint: Women Prisoners". It is by Lisa Edwards, a serving prisoner at Cookham Wood, and says:

"The penal system is geared to men, not women; this needs to be addressed. There are several courses on offer in the male prisons that are not available in the female prisons. This is not good enough. Female lifers have as much right to be rehabilitated as men do."

She continues: "We need more education, courses on drug and alcohol awareness, anger management, relationships, offending behaviour and victim awareness, as well as life and social skills."

At this point, I declare an interest as one of the trustees of an educational charity called Award Scheme Development Accreditation Network, known by its acronym, ASDAN. It provides education in life skills to thousands of students in schools and colleges all over the country. I have seen the effects of its work and can only say to my hon. Friend the Minister that that kind of education should be more widely available in prisons.

Lisa Edwards goes on to say: "We need help to help ourselves once released. Give us jobs in prison that will actually aid us outside, not mind numbing jobs like packing plastic spoons! Teach us new skills that we can use . . . Don't place us in prisons hundreds of miles away from family and friends. It is so important to maintain the bond with your children. Just because you are in prison, it doesn't mean you stop being a mother."

Annette L. Brooke: "At the moment, about 170 girls are in custody. The hon. Gentleman may know that there is a ministerial commitment to remove all 15 and 16-year-old girls from Prison Service custody by the summer."�[Official Report, Westminster Hall, 29 January 2002; Vol. 379, c. 63WH.]

We seem to be slipping behind the targets. Girls are not committing more crimes, therefore is sentencing the problem? Those issues hugely concern me.

"In the majority of cases the best way to promote resettlement and prevent reoffending is not to send women to prison in the first place. This is not preferential treatment for women. It takes account of the principle that treating men and women equally does not mean treating them the same. Imprisonment has a different and more damaging impact on women. We need policies which recognise that women's offending is different and which responds appropriately and proportionately.