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Covid-19 poses the greatest threat to the poor and to those with existing vulnerabilities. This meant that the criminal justice system was especially vulnerable to its ravages. The backlog of crimi...

The jurisdiction of England and Wales is currently at a critical juncture in the context of criminal justice. This chapter develops the important point made by Greenwood and Eady that improvements are also needed in how such cases can be detected post-conviction, but disputes their conclusion that innocence projects are the answer. It is concerned with what is called ‘unused material’; that which is of no use to the prosecution – but occasionally may be of assistance to the defence. As Greenwood and Eady recognise, the ‘obvious limitations of funding restrictions, student inexperience and the blurring of educational, academic and quasi-practitioner roles, student projects also face structural barriers, which explain their lack of impact.’ Criticism of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body charged with investigating claims of miscarriages of justice, has grown in recent years, some of it reasonable but much unfounded.

Discusses the impact academics and academic research can have on reform of the criminal law.

The criminal law looks set to play a larger role in regulating healthcare. Until recently, health professionals only faced the prospect of criminal liability if it could be proved that their gross negligence resulted in the death of a patient. In such a case, the professional could face a charge of gross negligence manslaughter (GNM). Prosecutions for ‘medical manslaughter’ have generated concern among doctors worried about what is perceived as a rise in the number of doctors facing criminal prosecution and the impact prosecutions are having on healthcare practice. May more frequent resort to the criminal process damage rather than promote better health care? In seeking to try to answer this question, the first problem is that reliable data in this area about how many prosecutions are brought and how they fare are limited due to the way cases are recorded. What evidence does exist is often based on media reports or samples that are not representative. This paper will argue that, while the real risk of being prosecuted for medical manslaughter remains low, such fears should not be dismissed because, as Donald Berwick has argued, ‘fear is toxic’ – for health professionals and their patients.

Despite the vast transitional justice scholarship relating to prisoner release, amnesties and prosecutions when conflicts end, there is a significant gap in practice and the literature regarding wrongful convictions. Uniquely amongst post-conflict societies, Northern Ireland has a body for investigating miscarriages of justice, albeit one designed for �€˜ordinary�€™ appeals. In the absence of a formal truth-recovery process, criminal appeals are becoming a proxy for addressing the role of the state during �€˜The Troubles,�€™ as well as remedying individual injustices. This article examines the approach of the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal during the conflict. It charts the developments in its decision-making following the cease-fires and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It concludes that the current system is unsatisfactory as it ignores the effects of the conflict on the appeal process, and offers no insights into the role of the Court during the conflict. Alternative models are suggested.

The Supreme Court determined that a ‘fresh approach’ was needed in an attempt to bring some clarity to the issue of the eligibility for compensation of those who have had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal.The definition that the majority agreed upon was that ‘a new fact will show that a miscarriage of justice has occurred when it so undermines the evidence against the defendant that no conviction could possibly be based upon it’.This article argues that the judgment suffers from a failure to consider the purpose of the legislation; that it is unclear whether the test is normative or historical and that this presents a particular problem in cases relating to the Northern Ireland conflict.The Court focuses on the guilt of the appellant and excludes from its consideration any notion of culpability by the state, which is a cause for concern. ‘Miscarriage of justice’ is a nebulous term. It has long been recognised that it means different things in legal and lay terms, 1 but its definition also alters depending on the stage of the legal process, as those who succeed in having their convictions overturned may not have suffered a miscarriage of justice according to the compensation scheme for such cases. The previous leading case on compensation, R (Mullen )v Secretary of State for the Home Department 2 (Mullen), further complicated matters by basing its unanimous decision on two conflicting opinions: the ‘narrow’ definition of Lord Steyn that a miscarriage of justice referred only to the conviction of the factually innocent; and the ‘wider’ definition of Lord Bingham which included cases in which something had gone seriously wrong with the trial process, resulting in an improper conviction. 3 The cases that followed Mullen 4 had proceeded on the basis that neither test was satisfied.This approach was becoming difficult to sustain and the Supreme Court

Disclosure of unused material is essential to a fair trial, and nondisclosure has been a potent cause of miscarriages of justice. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, however, recent legislation addressing this issue has prioritised the alleged problems that disclosure causes to the prosecution, rather than its demonstrable importance as a safeguard against wrongful convictions. Despite amendment by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, it is argued that the controversial disclosure provisions of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 cannot be made to work. This is a consequence of three fundamental defects in the statutory scheme: lack of consideration of the working cultures and practices of the key protagonists; the resulting inappropriate allocation of responsibilities; and insufficient recognition of the limited sanctions for disclosure failures that can be imposed fairly upon defendants under the current system. It has long been recognised that the effectiveness of due process reforms may be limited by police culture and the inadequate delivery of defence legal services. Drawing on new empirical data, this article suggests that it is equally important to consider the interplay between crime control legislation and occupational cultures. Legislative changes may otherwise reinforce poor practice and provoke injustice.

Much attention has focussed on the severity of the sentences imposed following the 2011 ‘summer rioting’ in England. The Court of Appeal confirmed that participation in a collective outbreak of disorder takes offending outside the sentencing guidelines. The position for sentencing riot-related offending in future is unclear, however, as the Court gave no indication of how to calibrate this departure, and the Sentencing Council has made offending during public disorder an aggravating factor only in its burglary guideline. This article explores new empirical evidence regarding the sentences imposed in Manchester, together with national Ministry of Justice data, to demonstrate for the first time how this ‘uplift’ effect was a feature throughout the criminal process, from arrest to sentence.

1. Regulation and criminal justice: exploring the connections and disconnections Graham Smith, Toby Seddon and Hannah Quirk Part I. Regulation and Criminal Justice: Framing the Debate: 2. Regulation and its relationship with the criminal justice process Anthony Ogus 3. Reconciling the apparently different goals of criminal justice and regulation: the 'freedom' perspective Andrew Sanders 4. On the interface of criminal justice and regulation Peter Grabosky Part II. Criminal Justice as Regulation: Responsivity, Alternatives and Expansion: 5. Nodal governance and the Zwelethemba model Clifford Shearing and Jan Froestad 6. Regulatory compliance: organisational capacities and regulatory strategies for environmental protection Gary Lynch-Wood and David Williamson 7. An intoxicated politics of regulation David Whyte 8. Governing by civil order: towards new frameworks of support, coercion and sanction? John Flint and Caroline Hunter 9. Counter-terrorism and community relations: anticipatory risk, regulation and justice Gabriel Mythen and Palash Kamruzzaman Part III. Regulation of Criminal Justice: Monitoring, Effectiveness and Accountability: 10. The regulation of criminal justice - inspectorates, ombudsmen and inquiries Anne Owers 11. Rethinking prison inspection: regulating institutions of confinement Toby Seddon 12. Regulating democracy: justice, citizenship and inequality in Brazil Barbara Hudson.

I am pleased to introduce this part of the first collaboration between BMJ journals Medical Humanities , Sexually Transmitted Infections i and Journal of Medical Ethics ii on the important theme of the criminalisation of disease transmission. I am grateful first to Debbie Kirklin, and then to Sue Eckstein for their guidance as editors. As well as bringing together scholarship for the diverse readership of these publications, these papers represent the first output of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series, Criminalising Contagion: Legal and Ethical Challenges of Disease Transmission and the Criminal Law, 1 undertaken with my colleagues, Catherine Stanton and David Gurnham. This venture is the offspring of several projects stemming from the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy at the University of Manchester that have explored the developing intersection of healthcare and the criminal law.2 It is proving a fascinating area in which to work. We have a range of panellists with interdisciplinary and international expertise, including lawyers, public health practitioners, charity organisations and academics, many of whom will be familiar to readers of these journals and who have contributed to this BMJ collection. Public health concerns, from sexually transmitted diseases to swine …