Keeping Faith With Their Own Convictions: The Royal Commission on Criminal Justice
| Author | Lee Bridges,Mike McConville |
| Published date | 01 January 1994 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1994.tb01922.x |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
REPORTS
Keeping Faith With Their
Own
Convictions: The
Royal Commission
on
Criminal Justice
Lee Bridges" and Mike McConville**
Our criminal justice system deals perfectly well with the overwhelming majority of cases
.
.
.
The cases
that are now a cause of our concern represent only a tiny proportion of the work that is carried out to a
very high standard.
I
would wish that
to
be
clearly understood,
so
that we don't get carried away with
the quite erroneous belief that everything in our current arrangements is flawed.' (Kenneth Baker,
Home Secretary, announcing establishment of Royal Commission on Criminal Justice,
14
March 1991)
The great majority of criminal trials are conducted in a manner which all the participants regard as fair,
and we see no reason
to
believe that the great majority of verdicts, whether guilty or not guilty, are not
correct
,
.
.
But the damage done by the minority of cases in which the system is seen to have failed is
out of all proportion
to
their number.* (Report of Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, July 1993)
Like all such bodies, the work of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice (the
Runciman Commission) must be assessed within a political context, and the
political context in which this Royal Commission has reported is very different
from that in which
it
was established just over two years ago. It was set up only a
few months after Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister (the only Royal
Commission appointed during the whole period since the Tories returned to office
in
1979)
and when Kenneth Baker was still the Home Secretary, as an immediate
damage limitation exercise following the release of the Guildford four and the
Birmingham six from long terms of imprisonment after their convictions
for
terrorist bombings in the
1970s
had finally been overturned by the Court of
Appeal. At the time
it
was known that the line of miscarriages
of
justice would
continue even while the Runciman Commission was sitting, and indeed this proved
to be the case. There followed, among others, the cases of the Maguires, Judith
Ward, Stefan Kiszko, the Tottenham three, the Darvell Brothers, the Cardiff three,
the Taylor sisters, Ivan Fergus, and various individuals falsely convicted as
a
result of misconduct over a number of years by the now-disbanded West Midlands
Serious Crime Squad and by Metropolitan Police officers based at Stoke
Newington police station in North London. The original convictions in some of
these cases post-dated the Police and Criminal Evidence Act
1984
(PACE), which
itself had emerged out of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (the
Philips Commi~sion)~ just over a decade earlier.
The miscarriages of justice therefore cast significant doubt on the reforms of
police practice and procedures represented by PACE and on other measures, such
as the setting up of the Crown Prosecution Service and a national duty solicitor
scheme for providing legal advice to suspects in police stations, that had resulted
from the Philips Commission. But their political impact potentially extended much
*Principal Research Fellow, School of Law, University of Warwick.
1
**Professor of Law and Director of the Legal Research Institute, University of Warwick.
HC Deb
vol
187,
col 1109.
14
March 1991.
2 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice,
Reporr,
Cm 2263 (London: HMSO, 1993) (hereinafter
RCCJ).
3
Royal'Commission on Criminal Procedure,
Reporf,
Cmnd
8092
(London:
HMSO,
1981).
Q
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further, threatening the consensus over crime, policing and criminal justice that
had begun to develop between the political parties from the mid-1980s onward.
Underneath the competing rhetoric of each party claiming to be the true upholders
of ‘law and order,’ there was a striking agreement, not only between politicians
but also amongst the judiciary, senior police officers, the Home Office and reform
groups, on the need to modernise the police, to divert many more minor offenders
outside the criminal justice system altogether, and to reduce the use of
imprisonment as a punishment for a range of non-violent offences. Much of this
consensus was reflected
in
the Criminal Justice Act 1991 which was completing its
passage through Parliament even as the Runciman Commission was settling down
to its work. The miscarriages of justice (and the long-running legal and political
campaigns that had led to their official acknowledgment) stood as an indictment of
many of the past and current practices of various participants in the criminal justice
system and as such opened up a much more radical reform agenda.
The political context in which the Runciman Commission has reported is
very
different. The Conservative Party under John Major has (perhaps unexpectedly)
won a further General Election, although with a significantly reduced Parlia-
mentary majority. Kenneth Baker has also departed office, replaced as Home
Secretary first by Kenneth Clarke and subsequently, just a few months before the
Runciman Commission reported, by Michael Howard (both former practising
barristers). By this time, the underlying consensus over criminal justice reform
had broken down, not as a result of the fallout from the miscarriages of justice but
in an outbreak of populist anti-reformism, particularly following the October 1992
implementation of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. Even prior to this, public anxiety
was growing, especially over juvenile crime, yet this group of offenders was seen
as one of the main beneficiaries
of
the reformed sentencing regime introduced
under the Act. Added to this was a widespread revolt by magistrates over the new
‘unit fine’ system that was seen as unfairly discriminating against middle-class
offenders. The resulting pressures forced the Government into a rapid legislative
reversal of these
key
sentencing reforms. In the meantime, publication in the
Sheehy Report4 of radical proposals for police management and pay reforms had
the effect
of
re-politicising the police of all ranks, while the unpopularity of the
Government raised the political stakes over ‘law and order,’ not least as a means
of
reconciling (or at least diverting attention from) divisions within the Conservative
Party over other issues.
In this context, the question we might pose about the Runciman Commission
report is not whether it provides a continuing impetus for reform of criminal
justice, but rather how far
it
can be used to stem the growing tide of reaction on
‘law and order’ issues. For either purpose we would look to the report to provide a
clear statement of
the
basic values which the criminal justice system should seek to
uphold and a consistent, comprehensive account of the workings of that system.
Our evaluation of the Runciman Commission is that it fails on both of these counts,
fudging and comprising on issues of principle and providing a strangely piecemeal
and incoherent analysis
of
the system and a seemingly contradictory set of
proposals for change. These weaknesses of the report stem as much from the
approach and method which the Runciman Commission adopted toward its inquiry
as they do from the limitations that were imposed on it by the Government or the
wider political environment in which the Commission was operating.
~~ ~~
4
76
Inquiry into
Policc
Responsibilities and Rewards.
Report,
Cm
2280
(London:
HMSO,
1993).
(f)
Thc
Modern
Law
Review
Limited
1994
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