People don’t think about the frailties of our criminal justice system and its potential for wrongful convictions, until it happens to them or to a loved one. With this in mind, I was struck by an extraordinary intervention by Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss in a debate in the House of Lords on the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) earlier this month.
The first female Lord Justice of Appeal shared with fellow peers that someone who worked for her ‘may have been unjustly sent to prison well over ten years ago’. Her solution to the problems that beset our miscarriage of justice watchdog was radical—sack the lot. ‘Is it not time that the entire commission is set aside and new people appointed, with everything done as a matter of some urgency?’ she said.
As a veteran CCRC-watcher, the entire brief debate was simply extraordinary. It was tabled by a former solicitor general, Lord Edward Garnier KC, to discuss the commission’s ‘complete collapse’.
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