The late Labour Minister Tony Benn once predicted that we were advancing towards a society where half the population is in prison and the other half are in the police force. Public policy is dominated by an obsession with imprisonment – once seen as a last resort, now it seems the only resort our governments can think of. England, Wales and Scotland have by far the highest rates of imprisonment
In his article of 9th February 2024 on the Justice Gap, “If Justice were a delusion, it would not be worth fighting for,” Here Francis Fitzgibbon KC initially suggests that I now think that the justice I have campaigned for is a mere delusion. More accurately, in the next sentence he recognises that the delusion is in the unquestioning faith in the system. The second position is the correct one.
In the first article in this series, I referred to the way the “Justice Delusion” can lead people to believe things that they simultaneously know to be untrue, how faith or ideology can lead us to justify ‘the system’ in defiance of the evidence. I suggest in this article, that recent political statements have illustrated a similar technique of delusion. This may be self-delusion or simply an attempt to delude
Raise a glass to Brian Buckle and his family. They have just spent £500,000 to pay for legal representation to overturn his wrongful conviction for a sex offence. Such “success” is rare. It is costly and ruins mental health. See: The cost of innocence: £500k – insidetime & insideinformation http://www.thejusticegap.com/former-high-court-judge-highlights-risk-of-miscarriages-of-justice-because-of-legal-aid-problems/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66928735 But how many more Brians are stuck in our non-functioning appeals system. How many have access to that sort
This is a slight deviation from the theme of the Justice Delusion and the plight of the Cardiff innocence project and its clients. However, there are a couple of topical issues which are closely related to our concerns that are worth highlighting before wider interest fades again. A few years ago, pictures were widely published of the body of a Syrian child refugee washed up on a Turkish beach. Suddenly
After 17 years of struggle against an increasingly reckless and intransigent criminal justice system, the small group of staff who have worked on the Cardiff University Law School Innocence Project have reluctantly concluded that “justice” in the UK, and probably throughout most of the world, is a delusion. Our common belief in the institutions and concepts of the law is founded on an ill-placed faith rather than evidential reality. The
