A Serious Indictment, Minister?
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2019.0584 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Pages | 448-450 |
Something strange but also rather upsetting happened in a meeting of the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament on the morning of Tuesday 29 September 2015. The business of the Committee was day three of the stage two proceedings on the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill (“the Bill”), which became the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 (“the 2016 Act”). The event was strange because it produced, without warning and with potentially difficult conceptual consequences, a new category of crime in Scots law – a differently understood “indictable offence”. It was upsetting both as an apparent abuse of parliamentary procedure and as a blatant failure to assure justice in the police station. It happened in this way.
In the light of a chain of tangled statutory amendment over thirty-five years and of the Carloway Review: Report and Recommendations (2011), the Bill sought to rationalise, improve and codify much of criminal justice procedure in Scotland. One important proposal in the original Bill was for a maximum period of twelve hours of police custody prior to charge or release – a reduction from the then maximum of twenty-four hours introduced by the Criminal Procedure (Legal Assistance, Detention and Appeals) (Scotland) Act 2010. This reduction, however, was controversial at stage one.
And it was in the shape of amendment 135 that the results of that Cabinet Secretarial continued listening were brought to the committee at stage two.
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