Miscarriage of justice

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A miscarriage of justice is primarily the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime that he or she did not commit. The term can also apply to errors in the other direction—"errors of impunity", and to civil cases—but those uses are rarer, though occurrences may be becomming more common. Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn, or "quash", a wrongful conviction, but this is often difficult to achieve. The most serious instances occur when a wrongful conviction is not overturned for several years, or until after the innocent person has been executed or died in jail.

"Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial. Wrongful convictions are frequently cited by death penalty opponents as cause to eliminate death penalties to avoid executing innocent persons. In recent years, DNA evidence has been used to clear many people falsely convicted.

Scandinavian languages have a word, the Norwegian variant of which is justismord, which is literally translated "justice murder". The term exists in several languages and was originally used for cases where the accused was convicted, executed, and later cleared after death. With capital punishment decreasing, the expression has acquired an extended meaning, namely any conviction of a person of a crime he/she did not commit. The retention of the term "murder" both demonstrates universal abhorrence against wrongful convictions and awareness of how destructive wrongful convictions are.

Contents

[edit] General issues

Causes of miscarriages of justice include:

  • plea bargains which offer incentives for the innocent to plead guilty
  • confirmation bias on the part of investigators
  • withholding or destruction of evidence by police or prosecution
  • fabrication of evidence or outright perjury by police (see testilying), or prosecution witnesses (e.g. Dr Charles Smith)
  • biased editing of evidence
  • poor identification by witnesses and/or victims
  • overestimation/underestimation of the evidential value of expert testimony
  • contaminated evidence
  • faulty forensic tests
  • false confessions due to police pressure or psychological weakness
  • misdirection of a jury by a judge during trial
  • perjured evidence by the real guilty party or their accomplices (frameup)
  • perjured evidence by the supposed victim or their accomplices

The risk of miscarriages of justice is one of the main arguments against the death penalty. Where condemned persons are executed promptly after conviction, the most significant effect of a miscarriage of justice is irreversible; wrongly-executed people are nevertheless occasionally posthumously pardoned – which is essentially a null action – or have their convictions quashed. Many states that still practice the death penalty hold condemned persons for ten years or more before execution.

Even when a wrongly-convicted person is not executed, spending years in prison often has an effect on the person and their family that is irreversible and substantial. The risk of miscarriage of justice is thereby also a reasonable argument against long sentences, like life sentence, and cruel sentence conditions.

[edit] Cases in specific countries

Main article: List of miscarriage of justice cases

[edit] The Netherlands

The Posthumus committees: the Schiedammerpark murder case, as well as the similarly overturned case of the Putten murder, led to the installation of the "Posthumus I committee", which analyzed what had gone wrong in the Schiedammerpark Murder case, coming to the conclusion that confirmation bias led the police to ignore and misinterpret scientific evidence (DNA). Subsequently, the so-called Posthumus II committee was set up to investigate whether more of such cases might have occurred. The committee received 25 applications from concerned and involved scientists, and decided to take three of them into further consideration: the Lucia de Berk case, the Ina Post[1] case, and the Enschede incest case. In these three cases, confirmation bias and misuse of complex scientific evidence is claimed by independent researchers (professors Wagenaar, van Koppen, Israëls, Crombag, Derksen) to have led to miscarriages of justice.

[edit] Norway

Despite Norway's international reputation, Norwegian police, courts, and prison authorities have been criticized and convicted on several occasions by the European Court of Human Rights for breaking the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

[edit] Spain

The Constitution of Spain guarantees compensation in cases of miscarriage of justice.

[edit] United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom a jailed person whose conviction is quashed may be paid compensation for the time they were incarcerated.

[edit] England, Wales and Northern Ireland

It was a notable problem that the parole system assumes that all convicted persons are actually guilty, and that it poorly handled those who are not. To be paroled, a convicted person was required to sign a document in which, among other things, they confessed to the crime for which they were convicted. Someone who refused to sign such a declaration spent longer in jail than someone who did. Some wrongly convicted people, such as the Birmingham Six, were refused parole for this reason. In 2005 the system changed in this respect, and began to parole prisoners who never admitted guilt.

In the event of a "perverse" verdict that involves the conviction of a defendant who should not have been convicted on the basis of the evidence presented, English law has no means of correcting this error: appeals being based exclusively upon new evidence or errors by the judge or prosecution (but not the defense), or because of jury irregularities. It occurred however in the 1930s when William Herbert Wallace was exonerated of the murder of his wife. There is no right to a trial without jury (except during the troubles in Northern Ireland when a judge or judges presided without a jury).

During the early 1990s there was a series of high-profile cases revealed to have been miscarriages of justice. Many resulted from police fabricating evidence to convict people they thought were guilty, or simply to get a high conviction rate. The West Midlands Serious Crime Squad became notorious for such practices, and was disbanded in 1989. In 1997 the Criminal Cases Review Commission[2] was established specifically to examine possible miscarriages of justice. However, it still requires either strong new evidence of innocence or new proof of a legal error by the judge or prosecution. For example, merely insisting you are innocent and the jury made an error, or stating there was not enough evidence to prove guilt, is not enough. It is not possible to question the jury's decision or query on what matters it was based. The waiting list for cases to be considered for review is at least two years on average.

[edit] Scotland

Reflecting Scotland's own legal system, which differs from that of the rest of the United Kingdom, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) was established in April 1999. All cases accepted by the SCCRC are subjected to a robust and thoroughly impartial review before a decision on whether or not to refer to the High Court of Justiciary is taken.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ >(Dutch) The Ina post case (Dutch wikipedia)
  2. ^ "Criminal Cases Review Commission". Ccrc.gov.uk. http://www.ccrc.gov.uk. Retrieved on 2009-03-18. 
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice"
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