Letter to the Editor: Reform criminal appeal process to cut miscarriages of justice

The following letter from APPEAL’s Founder and Director Emily Bolton, was written in response to this opinion piece by FT reporter, Kadhim Shubber. It was published by the Editor of the Financial Times on 20 April 2022:

Secrecy is indeed the enemy of justice in the courts of England and Wales (“Let in the light to the murky reaches of the English legal system”, Opinion, April 12). This is particularly true when it comes to criminal appeals. Having acted as an appeal lawyer in both Louisiana and London, I can confidently say I would prefer to be wrongfully convicted in the former.

There, prisoners and their legal teams can gain access to the full police record of the case. In the UK, it is a convoluted legal battle to get hold of the most basic records — and decisions over what to share with the defence are taken by the police themselves, hardly a neutral party in our adversarial system.

Even that most fundamental appeal resource, a record of what happened at trial, is difficult to obtain. Audio recordings are held for just seven years, and actual transcripts of those recordings are prohibitively expensive.

While the Criminal Cases Review Commission can in theory access such records, it is so poorly funded it simply does not have resources to do so. This is a huge barrier to would-be appellants, their legal teams and the Court of Appeal itself having a complete picture of what has happened in a case — as has been acknowledged by that court’s vice-president, along with the Westminster Commission on Miscarriages of Justice and the CCRC.

A long list of cases, most recently the Post Office scandal, shows that miscarriages of justice continue.

As a charity and law practice fighting wrongful convictions, Appeal is calling for trial audio recordings to be kept for at least as long as a convicted person is in custody, and a statutory right for all defendants eligible for legal aid to receive a full transcript of their trial.

We are also calling for greater rights of access to police records for would-be appellants.

Without these fundamental provisions, innocent prisoners will serve out their sentences in British prisons, and they will remain locked out of any meaningful appeal process just as securely as they are locked in the cells.

We were interested to see that a US Attorney at Law in New York wrote a response to Emily’s letter, also published by the Financial Times on 25 April 2022. He was shocked to learn that indigent defendants don’t automatically get given a transcript of their trial in this country, as is the law in the US following the Supreme Court case Griffin vs Illinois.