WE ARE A MAGAZINE ABOUT LAW AND JUSTICE | AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO
December 03 2024
WE ARE A MAGAZINE ABOUT LAW AND JUSTICE | AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO
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Cardiff Innocence Project was set up in 2006 as part of a UK-university innocence movement, where law students review criminal cases for people maintaining their innocence. We were naive then.

We had hoped to make a difference to the lives of innocent people wrongfully convicted. We have tried our futile best, hands tied behind our backs, our voices unheard. We see too many structural barriers, institutional deafness, and no real possibility of change.

So, have we become pointless?

Through the Justice Delusion we (and guests) will share our experiences, with the important caveat that these views are those of the authors individually, and not those of Cardiff University.

Read the Cardiff Innocence articles here

A Mass Imprisonment Society – Can we not do better?

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

Delusion or no Delusion, Justice is still worth Fighting for

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. 

Would you Believe it?

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

How many more Brians are out there?

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

Media Attention: Will Anything Change?

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

Pic: Patrick Maguire

The Justice Delusion: An Introduction

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