Criminal Appeal Act 1995: The Semantics of Jurisdiction
| Published date | 01 July 1996 |
| Author | Richard Nobles,David Schiff |
| Date | 01 July 1996 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1966.tb02099.x |
LEGISLATION
Criminal Appeal Act
1995:
The Semantics
of
Jurisdiction
David Schiff and Richard
Nobles”
This statute is informed by a certain history, which it
will
continue. The original
statute setting up a Court of Criminal Appeal, the Criminal Appeal Act
1907,
was
passed against great opposition from a number of senior judges,’
in
response to a
number of high-profile miscarriage of justice cases. The Criminal Appeal Act
1995
has been enacted
in
response to similar events, although in this case
with
the direct
approval of the Lord Chief Justice and other senior judges.* The purpose of this
note
is
to consider what there might be
in
this Act,
if
anything, which
will
substantially alter the practice of criminal appeals. In particular, what is likely to
alter the perceived failure to remedy miscarriages of justice? It should
be
noted
that
in
its recent judgments (prior to this Act) the ‘new’ Court of Appeal has
already discounted the need for reform by adopting a ‘different’ attitude to that of
the Court under the previous Lord Chief Ju~tice.~ This note focuses on two aspects
of the first, the change in the grounds of appeal, which are reduced
to
the
single requirement that the conviction is ‘unsafe’; second, the transfer of the
responsibility for considering the safety of a conviction and referring it to the Court
of
Appeal (Criminal Division) from the Home Secretary’s C3 Division to a new
body, the Criminal Cases Review Commission. We would argue that neither of
these reforms of themselves will alter
the
practices of the Court of Appeal. With
the
new arrangements, as before, the important factor is the Court of Appeal’s
unstated (and unstateable) sense of appropriate practice.
*Law Department, London School of Economics.
1
See particularly the debate
in
the House of Lords on the second reading of the Criminal Appeal Bill,
1907: HL Deb (4th series)
vol
179 cols 1471-1484
5
August 1907.
2 The high-profile miscarriage of justice cases had at least one general effect; they created
a
consensus
(at least in public) on the need for reform, forcing the participants
in
the criminal justice process to
become (but for different reasons) reformers.
Whether there has been
a
new attitude and, even more problematic, whether this attitude is recognised
and adopted by
all
members of the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division), is an open question. See
Hugo Young’s account of Lord Chief Justice Taylor’s views, after his first three months
in
office,
in
The
Guardian,
2OJuly 1992, p21. The Parliamentary debates on the Criminal Appeal Bill were
informed by the belief that ‘the prevailing climate of the Court of Appeal has altered markedly over
the past few years’: Mr D. Anderson, HC Deb
vol
258 col 935 26April 1995. But,
as
Chris Mullin
warned, ‘Many Honourable Members have remarked on an improvement of attitude following the
change of personnel
in
that court
-
but they could
of
course change back again. The suspicion has
been voiced to me that the recent liberalisation may in some way be affected by the fear that
something more drastic might be done to limit its powers’:
ibid
cols 951-952.
There are other matters which may have important practical implications for criminal appeals, but
which neither fit easily into the focus of this note nor are fully dealt with
in
this statute; for example,
the assessment
of
compensation (s28). There are
also
other matters in this statute of
a
miscellaneous
character which are meant simply to tie up a number
of
loose ends, but which may be readily
criticised, such
as
the provisions relating to disclosure of information
(ss
23-25).
3
4
573
8
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