MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE IN THE UK

Critically Discuss Whether There Are Sufficient Safeguards To Prevent Miscarriages Of Justice In The UK

Critically discuss whether there are sufficient safeguards to prevent miscarriages of justice in the UK.

Introduction

A miscarriage of justice can result from non-disclosure of evidence by police or prosecution, fabrication of evidence, poor identification, overestimation of the evidential value of expert testimony, unreliable confessions due to police pressure or psychological instability and misdirection by a judge during trial. Since 1984 two pieces of legislation have been introduced in an attempt to prevent further miscarriages. The Police And Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) gave detectives rigid rules on how long they could question suspects for and insisted interviews be taped to ensure there was no mistreatment or undue intimidation (Nobles, 2000).

The Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act was also introduced in an attempt to make sure police or the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) disclose to the defence everything which could be relevant to their case. However a recent review of disclosure undertaken by the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate found the CPIA did not have the "confidence of criminal practitioners".

Discussion

Investigative interviewing is of paramount importance in every legal system in the world. The development of Investigative interviewing has led to the hope that positive reaction would be received from witnesses and reliability of evidence would be achieved. However, various cases of miscarriages of justice has occurred causing lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. The purpose of this study is to learn more about how cases of miscarriages of justice have helped to change investigative interviewing practices for the better. It is hoped that information from this study may be useful in identifying the improvements in investigative interviewing as a result of cases of miscarriages of justice.

'One area of policing that involves considerable face-to-face interaction with members of the public and where expectations of both police and public are likely to be influential and where relations of trust and confidence are vital is when police officers interview witnesses of crime. In the past, police officers lacked confidence in themselves and their abilities, and they constantly assumed that every suspect was guilty therefore failing to extract accurate and reliable evidence, had poor interviewing skills and where unprofessional in the approach in which they carried out their interviews.' In any police inquiry, police officers may be interested in only a proportion of the information that a witness can provide' (Roach, 2005).They resorted to violence and verballing during interviews and this resulted in false confessions from suspects. 'In the past, investigators in both the public sector and the police saw interviews as a means of gaining a confession, rather than gathering accurate information and a full account'. Confessions could vary from voluntary confession where there is no existence of external factors, coerced compliant confession such as aggressive questioning and coerced internalized confession where the interviewee beliefs he committed the crime due to pressure and stress put on them during the interviewing ...