A Brief Rejoinder to Michael Zander
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1994.tb01937.x |
Published date | 01 March 1994 |
Date | 01 March 1994 |
March
19941
A
Brief Rejoinder
to
Michael Zander
about it?) They equate more guilty pleas with more miscarriages of justice (p
90)
-
a proposition for which there is no evidence.I0 They say that the system’s
‘overall presumption of guilt’ would be ‘reinforced .
,
.
by greater powers for the
police to obtain evidence from suspects’ (p
W),
when the evidence in question is
mainly
physical or real evidence, such as samples for DNA analysis, which ought
to
be
better evidence of guilt (or for that matter, non-guilt) than is usually
available. They speak of ‘new limitations on the Court of Appeal’
(p
W),
when the
Report’s proposals regarding the Court of Appeal are mainly in the direction of
better protection of the defendant. They suggest that the Report’s recom-
mendations provide a useful ‘law and order’ agenda, when they could equally well
have pointed to the longer (indeed, much longer) list of useful reforms to aid the
defence. On each topic Bridges and McConville present only what serves their
thesis and ignore everything to the contrary.
In short,
this
is not
so
much a review worthy of a scholarly journal as a
hatchet-job.
A
Brief Rejoinder
to
Michael Zander
Lee Bridges and Mike McConville
Despite the deep sense of anger and betrayal the Commission’s report evoked
in
many quarters, we attempted in our original article to adopt an academic and
analytical approach. We did not
see
it as our purpose to summarise the whole
of
the Commission’s recommendations, let alone to categorise and count them as
‘pro’ or ‘anti’ the defence or prosecution
-
an exercise we regard as devoid
of
intellectual merit and academic credibility. Rather, as we made clear at the start of
our article, we sought to place the work of the Commission in a wider political
context and, from that perspective, to analyse the broad direction in which their
recommendations might take the criminal justice system. The examples we cited
from the Report to illustrate our thesis were necessarily selective, although within
the limited time and space available to us we did in fact cover a substantial range of
the Commission’s recommendations.
Nor are we alone in criticising the Commission’s terms of reference and their
interpretation of them; this has been a central theme of many critical responses to
the report. The Commission were instructed to examine the effectiveness of the
criminal justice system in terms of two fundamental objectives: the conviction of
the guilty and the acquittal of the innocent. They were intended to have regard to
the ‘efficient use of resources’ only as a background context when considering the
two main objectives.
I
The Commission went astray by first confusing
~
10
Do
they believe that there are fewer miscarriages of justice in London and the South East than in the
North
of England on account of a much higher rate of not guilty pleas? If
so,
on what ground?
1
Thus,
to
take some examples, in rejecting proposals for video recording of confessions, the
Commission were right
to
consider the resource costs of such an innovation. On the other hand, we
have criticised the Commission for not considering
the
resource implications for private defence
solicitors and legal aid (as well as other more serious consequences)
of
their recommendation
to
allow
police questioning of suspects
to
extend beyond charge. And the Commission’s failure to give detailed
consideration
to
the
likely costs
of
a Criminal Case Review Authority has provided the Government
with a ready excuse to postpone implementation of this recommendation.
267
0
The
Modern
Law Review Limited
1994
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