It’s time to come clean about miscarriages of justice & mistakes denied, says Jon Robins
Talk about the prevalence of miscarriages of justice these days is often met with an eye-roll accompanied by the suspicion that you are wildly over-stating your case. The Guardian ’s veteran crime correspondent Duncan Campbell once noted the widely-held assumption that after the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Bridgewater Three et al, all cases that began in the 1970s: ‘The days of miscarriages of justice were over. Not so.’
To some extent, this year’s stream of disclosure scandals beginning with the Liam Allan case has assisted in re-educating the public as to the frailties of our impoverished justice system and its propensity to make serious mistakes.
And yet even leading lawyers insist that miscarriages of justice don’t occur. At the start of the year, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Alison Saunders informed the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that, in her view, there were no innocent people in prison as a result of failures to disclose.
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