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Supreme court sketch (R v Jogee), www.isobelwilliams.blogspot.co.uk
This is an open letter from Sheffield University’s Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre in response to an interview on the Justice Gap with Richard Foster, chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The letter is co written by Professor Claire McGourlay; Dr Andrew Green; James Cairns (PG student manager); Chris Musgrave (PG student manager); and Elliott Booth (UG student manager).
See also an open letter from Professor Julie Price, of Cardiff Law School (An open letter to the CCRC).
Discussing university innocent projects, Richard Foster said:
‘If you think that you have a terminal illness, would you rather have your case considered by medical students in the bar on Friday night – or would you rather send it to a consultant oncologist?’
Dear Richard Foster,
We are writing this letter regarding your remarks on university Innocence Projects that were published in an interview with The Justice Gap on the 24th of March. First of all not all projects in the UK are Innocence Projects. Most projects in the UK are no longer called Innocence Projects because of the strict membership criteria of the international Innocence Network. But for the sake of this letter we will refer to them as such.
Secondly, whilst we do acknowledge that the CCRC is underfunded and overloaded with cases, we also find your remarks about the competency of Innocence Projects misjudged; based on incorrect assumptions and assertions that have the potential to undermine the work we carry out.
We will take the rest in order and we now turn to Innocence Projects as investigatory bodies and not campaign organisations.
For the purposes of clarity we first turn to your comments identifying Innocence Projects as campaign organisations. While our students have a wider interest in miscarriages of justice and students may personally support or have interests in reforming the law which often leads to wrongful convictions, we are not a campaign body.
The Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre at the University of Sheffield acts as an impartial reviewer of a client’s case, much like the CCRC. We assess cases on their own merits with no agenda other than to aim to overturn the convictions of innocent people. As has happened in the past, we will stop reviewing a case if our investigation leads us to uncover evidence suggesting a client is plainly guilty, leaving them free to continue with an application at the CCRC if they so wish.
We will next turn to you comments about ‘hangers on’.
“What doesn’t help anyone is groups ‘hanging on to a case’”.
To us it seems odd for you to have used this phrase “hanging on to a case” as though you yourself do not know the challenges of reviewing a criminal case. As you well know, Innocence Projects at universities up and down the country can do nothing but make slow progress on casework and often for reasons outside of their control. Unlike the CCRC we do not have statutory powers to request information and from time to time have to rely on our contacts with barristers or solicitors to obtain necessary documents, but this still has limitations. Beyond that, examining evidence and contacting clients is often a slow and difficult process, hindered further by awaiting feedback or information from the police and organisations such as the CPS and occasionally the CCRC.
What we do have is the help of talented students who elect to take time out of their degrees to fight injustice and educate themselves about the failings of the criminal justice system. The students allocated to our project are not randomly selected but are of a high academic capability and have a passion for the due process of law. They are the ones who rigorously pore over cases for hours while balancing a very challenging degree. Here at the University of Sheffield we believe that our duty to our client is discharged once we have covered the case thoroughly and exhausted all possible avenues and, yes, sometimes this process will take time. However, we strongly believe that it is better to have given the potentially innocent client every chance of having his/her conviction overturned than to rush through their case and pass it off when nothing of merit jumps out at a brief read over.
The work of the CCRC is to be much admired, and it is commendable that it ensures that the due process of law is respected. Indeed, under your stewardship, Richard, it has faced many of its budgetary challenges with patience and dedication to seeing its duty fulfilled. It is for the good of our society that the CCRC is successful and we appreciate that you and your colleagues work hard – often with much success – to achieve this end. However, unlike the CCRC our students are not faced with the pressure to turn costs into results. Our students work on a pro bono basis meaning that we can spend more time than the CCRC on each individual case. It is the nature of the beast that our cases should trickle into the CCRC and as such it is disheartening to hear your brazen comments about ‘hanging on’ to them. Our cases as not kept with malice or ignorance, but with care.
To suggest that we purposely ‘hang on to cases’ is a misrepresentation of our attitude to the work we do.
Now we move to the comment that surprised us the most and the one that made Professor McGourlay lost for words – that is certainly a challenge and you managed to achieve it in one sentence.
‘If you think that you have a terminal illness, would you rather have your case considered by medical students in the bar on Friday night – or would you rather send it to a consultant oncologist?’
Medical analogies in the context of legal procedure are dubious in many circumstances but this one was simply untrue. Much like a medical student would not seek to give a proper diagnosis of someone’s ills in a pub on a Friday night, nor would a law student seek to offer sound legal advice. Sure, we’ve all been there when our mate from back home asked “would I get arrested if I did so and so”, but as case workers we do not work in a bar. We meet in dedicated offices and buildings with computers, cabinets and files, and not just on Fridays. Indeed the reality is that tenacious investigation continues throughout the week often seeing students visiting clients in prison, liaising with the families of our clients, working with expert witnesses and legal practitioners, as well as hours of library based research. There is absolutely no truth in any suggestion that the work we carry out is not taken as seriously as it could be. We are diligent, rigorous and motivated in our investigations – Monday to Sunday.
There are a number of reasons why wrongfully convicted individuals prefer to come to pro-bono projects. In this country, an individual with terminal cancer need not pay a penny to receive the appropriate care they need. Unfortunately, the wrongfully convicted are not so lucky. Many are priced out of the legal sector by its prohibitive costs and while an application to the CCRC may be afforded, the fee for an expert to draft it is not. Here, we are conscious that most individuals have never had to step into a courtroom, that the layman doesn’t understand legal jargon and that an innocent man may never have previously given any thought to the criminal legal process – what law abiding person would have to? Our time is given freely and we are fortunate enough to receive close supervision from experienced directors and group leaders. For example, Dr Andrew Green at the University of Sheffield provides expert guidance on the correct way to proceed with contacting key witnesses, defendants, courts, lawyers and the Crown Prosecution Service, as well as ways of making a case to the CCRC.
We were sorry to read that such an off-hand remark. Meanwhile our students are not in the pub but are working hard to try to ensure that wrongful convictions are overturned. Many publicise blogs on miscarriages of justice, which are circulated among our members to enhance the way we carry out our work. Much of this is drawn from their experiences. For example in just the last two months we have spent three hours with our client in a secure hospital, had two students spend some evenings receiving advice from a practising lawyer, and thoroughly examined how the cases of nine clients may best be presented following the recent Jogee decision.
We have contacted forensic experts, made and organised hours of prison visits, attended seminars on how to make legal aid work pay, attended human rights and wrongful conviction conferences and in the last year we have had guest lectures from the likes of Paddy Joe Hill, Robert Brown and Martin Foran. Beyond that, a team of our students even won the Law Commission competition 2015 with a submission regarding reforming the law of joint enterprise. After all that, we like to celebrate our team successes in the pub.
When it comes to a wrongfully convicted client they deserve to sit in a proper office when they visit us and a professional team should we have to visit them in prison. We know we owe them that, and it is a shame that you might have thought otherwise.
Finally, turning to your comments regarding the number of CCRC applications received from projects like ours. We also feel this is not a particularly fair representation of the facts. The figure you quoted of 100 cases is old and inaccurate data – collected by INUK (as it then was). INUK’s figures were never available for transparent verification. Furthermore, some Innocence Projects were not part of INUK, and some had left, for example Cardiff in 2010. You may also wish to note that INUK is no longer a network and we do not know why it continues to represent itself as such; it is run by one person, and represents just that one person as far as is known. It has no other members. So if the figures you are still quoting are from INUK then you might want to investigate, before commenting, what INUK stands for and who runs it as it does not represent projects in the UK.
Further, given the rules on who can contact the CCRC regarding an application it is likely the CCRC may not always be aware they are reading the result of tireless work from a group of students. Our work takes many forms: often this will involve writing a CCRC application to be submitted by our client or their legal representative. Equally, when necessary we will write supplementary submissions to a CCRC application, submitted again through the appropriate avenue to the CCRC. Unfortunately your comment only serves to further undermine the work we do, conducive only to the end of damaging the morale and motivation of our hardworking students.
Richard, we, the students and staff who work at the Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre, have met many of your colleagues in the recent years. We know what the CCRC is about and the kind of people who work there. We have the same aims and the same guiding principles. To see such careless comment about the competence of our student caseworkers is disappointing to say the least, coming from the head of an organisation with which we work so closely and with whom we wish to maintain a good relationship. We feel that the CCRC has improved greatly under your leadership, particularly in terms of waiting times and thoroughness of investigations, and comments like these do nothing but harm our mutually supportive relationship.
We extend an invitation to you to visit the Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre at the University of Sheffield so you can see for yourself our working practices, and how we can better their efficiency for the future.
Kind regards,
The Miscarriages of Justice Review Centre
Professor Claire McGourlay
Dr Andrew Green
James Cairns (PG student manager)
Chris Musgrave (PG student manager)
Elliott Booth (UG student manager)
