Restoring Justice
| Author | Stephen P. Savage |
| Published date | 01 April 2007 |
| Date | 01 April 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370807074855 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Volume 4 (2): 195–216: 1477-3708
DOI: 10.1177/1477370807074855
Copyright © 2007 European Society of
Criminology and SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
www.sagepublications.com
Restoring Justice
Campaigns against Miscarriages of Justice and the
Restorative Justice Process
Stephen P. Savage
University of Portsmouth, UK
ABSTRACT
Miscarriages of justice in Britain have been exposed as injustices largely as a
result of public campaigns by victims of miscarriages and by the families and
associates of those victims. This study, based on empirical research on those
involved with justice campaigns, examines the motivational forces behind justice
campaigns and the goals that justice campaigners seek to achieve. In doing so
it applies the conceptual framework and principles of restorative justice as a
means of interpreting the motivations behind justice campaigns, and in
particular the principles of victim participation, dialogue, communication,
apology, healing and future orientation. It concludes that, insofar as justice
campaigns exhibit restorative justice principles, this is very much a one-sided
process, because the ‘offenders’ in miscarriages of justice – the state and state
institutions – are reluctant to accept guilt or acknowledge failure.
KEY WORDS
Campaigns / Justice / Miscarriages / Restorative Justice.
Introduction
In February 2005 the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, announced that he
was to give a public apology to the ‘Guildford Four’ and the ‘Maguire
Seven’, people originally convicted of the Irish terrorist bombings in south-
ern England in the mid-1970s. He stated:
It is a matter of great regret when anyone suffers a miscarriage of justice. There
was a miscarriage of justice in the case of Gerald Conlon and all the Guildford
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Four as well as Giuseppe Conlon and Anne Maguire and all of the Maguire Seven.
And, as with the others, I recognize the trauma that the conviction caused the
Conlon and Maguire families and the stigma which wrongly attaches to them to
this day. I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and such an injus-
tice. That is why I am making this apology today. They deserve to be completely
and publicly exonerated. (Guardian, 10 February 2005)
Blair’s apology came some 16 years after the convictions of the Guildford
Four were quashed in 1989 (Rozenberg 1994: 308–10) and 25 years after
Guiseppe Conlon died in prison. The apology came after a lengthy cam-
paign, following earlier campaigns against the original convictions, which
ended with a petition signed by over 10,000 people, including Jim Sheridan,
the director of the Oscar-nominated film In the Name of the Father, which
told the story of the Guildford Four.
After meeting privately with the Prime Minister, Gerry Conlon stated:
This hasn’t ended for us. But today is the start of the end … If you damage people
and you can repair them, it is your duty to do that… The good thing is that he has
acknowledged it, and he accepts we are in pain, that we are suffering terrible,
terrible nightmares and terrible post-traumatic stress disorder… It has been harder
to clear our names than to get out of prison. (Guardian, 10 February 2005)
This event and the discourse surrounding it provide a telling insight into
the nature of justice itself. More specifically, this scenario presents us with
certain features of a restorative justice process, tying together miscarriages of
justice, campaigns against miscarriages of justice and the discourses and prin-
ciples of the restorative justice model. The ingredients of a restorative justice
process in this case are:
An ‘offence’: the wrongful convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven
Victim(s): those wrongfully convicted
‘Offender(s)’: the state and its agencies – the police, the courts and so on
An encounter and dialogue: the meeting between the Prime Minister and Gerry
Conlon
An apology: the public apology as an ‘outcome’ or ‘resolution’ of the process
An element of healing or repair: what Conlon referred to as the ‘start of the end’,
the healing effect of the apology itself on victims and their families
It is this potential for interrelating miscarriages of justice and campaigns to
redress those miscarriages of justice on the one hand, and the discourses of
restorative justice on the other, that is the focus of this paper.
The term ‘miscarriages of justice’ in this context covers two categories
of ‘injustice’: first, ‘wrongful convictions’, where a person or persons have
been convicted on questionable grounds (such as on false confessions, as
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