Max Clifford: a new broom?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3uMgcRUYBs

While innocent men were languishing in UK prisons,

"Failure to disclose vital evidence is the biggest cause of miscarriages of justice, and the problem is getting worse", the outgoing chairman of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has confidently asserted.

In spite of this, in January of 2018 Britain's most senior prosecutor Alison Saunders claimed that no innocent people were in prison because of failures to disclose vital evidence at the same time that several high-profile cases were collapsing around her ears.

Shifting the Burden of Proof

Potentially exculpatory mobile phone data exonerating accused individuals was being discovered by both prosecution and defence lawyers. But despite these damning discoveries Ms Saunders insisted that she didn't think that any failure to share evidence resulted in anyone being wrongly jailed. Interviewed on the BBC's Radio 4 'Today' programme, she confidently asserted that "The protections are there to make sure there is a fair trial and people are not wrongly imprisoned." She did concede however that "The problem we have found recently is around the ever increasing use of social media and the digital material we obtain." Most worrying however was her statement in that interview that it was up to the defence team to produce any such evidence, giving the impression that the defence team's job was to prove the defendant's innocence, when even first-year law students know that it is the prosecution's job to prove guilt.

Innocent Men In Prison

Following the abandonment of a number of high-profile cases later that year, with the appointment of a new Director of Public Prosecutions, Max Hill QC, who had been the independent reviewer of terrorism laws before taking up this post, said that even more men may have been wrongly jailed for sex offences because of withheld evidence. This was a clear statement in direct contrast to that of his predecessor, who had insisted that there were not any further cases. Mr. Hill was reluctant to guarantee that there were no longer any innocent men in prison because of prosecution failures. "It is impossible for me to know." he said.

After the collapse of a number of rape cases because of prosecution failures to pass on exculpatory evidence to the defence, in a review of more than 3,600 trials, difficulties were discovered in 47 cases. At the time, 14 of these defendants were actually in custody. That is, 47 families in pre-trial trauma, many of whose male accused had been torn from their partners and children for months and even years. 14 of these innocent men had been languishing in prison for months awaiting trial, some of them becoming victims of an horrific prison regime in which other criminals treated sex offenders as the lowest of the low, and were keen to take violent retributive measures.

Further Reviews?

On the matter of the CPS review Mr Hill assured the BBC that there would be further reviews, and that the CPS were committed to ensuring that such errors in the future would be kept to an absolute minimum. As for the comments of his predecessor denying that any innocent men were in prison, all he would say was, "that was then. This is now. I can't overstate the importance of ensuring that relevant information gathered during a police investigation that is not used at trial is made available to defence teams. In any case where an issue has been raised about disclosure, whether pre-trial or post-trial, we are committed to looking into that to find if there is anything that is hidden." Significantly, ignoring the whole problem of false/enforced/negotiated guilty pleas, arrived at by various means, he went on to ask for the concession that in cases where no issue had been raised, in most cases by a guilty plea, "there doesn't appear to be a problem, does there?"

Serious Miscarriages of Justice

Mr. Hill appeared to rule out the possibility of a targeted review of previous CPS cases, called for by Richard Foster, outgoing chairman of the CCRC. This was a matter of deep concern for Mr. Foster, who declared that, "If the state gets it wrong, it is the state’s responsibility to put things right. The CCRC has been in touch with the law officers and the CPS to propose such a review and to offer to assist. But the offer has not been taken up. In my view, there is a risk that serious miscarriages of justice will go unrectified as a result."

Failed prosecutions

Oxford student Oliver Mears, after spending two years on bail, had the case against him dropped days before his trial. The trial of Liam Allan was stopped at Croydon Crown Court in December 2018. The prosecution of Isaac Itery collapsed at Inner London Crown Court a few days later, and the following month the case against Samson Makele was halted at Snaresbrook Crown Court after his defence team uncovered significant images on his mobile phone which had not previously been made available.

All of this may appear to the casual reader a satisfying outcome for innocent men, and a proof of the viability of a legal system that gets it right in the end. Leaving aside the shame and violence of having to spend many months in prison, this would be to ignore the tragedy of broken families, loss of employment and a home, a sentence to lifetime poverty, the detailed scrutiny of your private life, increasing debt and the mandatory prurience of Social Services especially when there are children in the family. The outcome is sometimes suicide, but even when there is no such dramatic trauma, there is always the accompanying suspicion among neighbours, friends and acquaintances that there is no smoke without fire, and there remains the demand from potential employers and voluntary agencies that you undergo a risk assessment - just in case. A false allegation of sexual crime is itself a life-changing event. I can guarantee that nothing will ever be the same again.