Miscarriages of Justice: A Systems Approach

Abstract

That there have been a number of high profile miscarriages of justice in recent times in Britain is undisputed. The Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) has indicated as such by quashing the convictions of numbers of prisoners who had served very long prison sentences. The media, fuelled by the research of investigative journalists, had been convinced of the innocence of many of these people for some period of time before the Court of Appeal's final judgments. Those interested in reforming criminal justice have based their reform proposals on their own conclusions, bolstered by the final judgments of the Court of Appeal,' that there have been miscarriages of justice and their understanding of the reasons for such miscarriages. However, each of these groups, in accepting that miscarriages of justice have occurred, are not in many respects accepting the same things, but are actually accepting or implying different things. When the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) quashes a criminal conviction, it does not pronounce on the innocence or guilt of those whose convictions no longer stand.2 Nor does it offer an alternative narrative of events to that which, following the original conviction, had been constructed by the media and nothers to account for the finding of guilt by the jury. When the media and investigative journalists disclose miscarriages of justice, they claim that the persons previously convicted are innocent and they offer alternative narratives of the events that took place, and often suggest who they believe to be guilty. When legal reformers offer miscarriages of justice as justifications for their reform proposals, they tell us very little about the guilt or innocence of those who had served prison sentences, but tell us a lot about those faults in the system that need to be corrected. There may be a minimum conception or starting point of miscarriage of justice which allows these high profile cases to be utilised within disparate discourses; but there is no one conception of miscarriage of justice that consistently operates between the discourses of these different groups. And, even within the distinct groups, within their systems of communication, it is often difficult to formulate one coherent conception of miscarriage of justice. We believe that these different