A New Golden Age for the CCRC?

'Podlife 2' by Sean Bw Parker

The Law Commission has announced that the ‘real possibility test’, which the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has been using to reject 98% of applications, should be replaced with a ‘suspicion of miscarriage of justice’ safety test. This is a very welcome development, and could be seen as a vindication of the work of Dr Michael Naughton of the University of Bristol and the Empowering The Innocent (ETI) organisation, known to many in the trade as ‘Dr Miscarriages of Justice’.

This 98% figure puts the CCRC on a par with court trials in Japan, with their 99% conviction rates: clearly a system which doesn’t like to be seen to be wrong. These proposals for a fairer gateway system come following Helen Pitcher’s resignation as Chair after the Andy Malkinson scandal, where he spent 17 year in prison for a rape he didn’t commit, and which Bob Woffinden and Felicity Stryjak can find no evidence for occurring in the first place.

Greater Manchester Police knew about the exonerating DNA evidence for the last ten years of Malkinson’s incarceration, during which he made two appeals to the CCRC, knocked back on the real possibility test each time. It fell to Emily Bolton and Matt Foot’s charity APPEAL to find the DNA and present it, this being the ‘smoking gun’ necessary for cases to sneak into the 2% sweet spot - and now Andy is free (though still fighting/waiting for compensation).

Dr Naughton’s line for twenty-plus years has been that the CCRC was set up as an independent watchdog for the Court of Appeal following cases such as the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, but has since become a tool for propping up wrongful convictions rather than exposing them.

Unfortunately, rather than headlines about how the CCRC's real possibility test fails innocent applicants and their families, headlines have been taken over by the fact that elsewhere in the Sentencing Council proposals there is a Critical Race Theory-inspired clause saying that fewer women, people of colour and trans should be sent to prison, in contradiction of the Equality Act 2010.

Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood immediately condemned this proposal, but it is evidence of how deeply embedded identitarian theories are in the British criminal justice system. But a broken watch can still tell the right time twice a day - Law Commission amnd Sentencing Council reports are compiled by various governmental ‘teams’, so it’s important to remember that the counter-intuitive can be mixed in with the progress.

So here’s to a Golden Age for the CCRC, with its brief as a serious checker for miscarriages of justice returned - and actioned.

Sean Bw Parker (MA) is an artist and writer on justice reform