Justice Gap
The Justice Gap reported that the miscarriage of justice watchdog referred just 13 cases back to the Court of Appeal last year representing the second lowest number of referrals in its 22 year history.
Earlier in the year, the CCRC’s new chair Helen Pitcher in one of her first public pronouncements said that the number of cases it referred for appeal ‘while clearly very important’ should ‘not be the be-all-and-end-all’. In her introduction to the annual report published at the end of last week, Pitcher acknowledged ‘some controversy’ over her words. She went to say that she stood by ‘the idea’ that if the CCRC was ‘judged solely on the number of referrals we make each year’ there was no recognition of the ‘extensive and diligent work we do in cases that cannot be referred’. ‘The CCRC is an organisation with a single job,’ argued Justice Gap editor Jon Robins in an article for the Byline Times. ‘It was set up to send cases of alleged miscarriages of justice back to the Court of Appeal. But, the new figures confirm a disturbing trend. Over the first two decades, the watchdog sent 33 cases a year on average back to the Appeal judges. The number of referrals collapsed three years ago when, in 2016, it referred just a dozen cases (and only 19 in 2017). ’The CCRC identified as the main reason for the collapse in cases sent back to the Court of Appeal ‘the absence of thematically linked multiple referrals’. However, as Robins pointed out, in the last two years, more than half (18) of the 32 referrals related to what could be described as a single “thematically linked” class of applicants, refugees and asylum seekers.He continued: ‘The CCRC is to be commended for pursuing these important cases, but if you put that work to one side, then the watchdog is barely sending any cases back to the Appeal judges.’
For full article https://crimeline.co.uk/crimeline-news/page/12/
