Innocent But Accused

Have you ever been arrested and prosecuted for a crime you did not commit and worse still have you been convicted of that crime or pleaded guilty on the advice of your lawyers although well aware of your innocence. If so I would like to hear from you and receive your views of the criminal justice system, particularly your experiences with the Legal Aid System and the effects on you and your family.

It strikes me that there are any number of things wrong with our criminal justice system which seems to be geared to get convictions at any cost to justice. It is actually quite hard to defend yourself if you are truly innocent as you have little or nothing you can say in your defence unless it is the type of case where an alibi works and you have a provable one and even the use of the word alibi seems to have a strong hint of “made up” about it.

For anybody, guilty or innocent the Criminal Justice system is a terrible thing to be introduced to and the police will exercise psychological pressure on the arrested person in an attempt to get a confession or even an interview without a solicitor present.

Getting to court often seems even worse, many defence lawyers feel that Lay Magistrates are case hardened and unlikely to be strictly applying the “beyond all reasonable doubt” rule. In the Crown Court the situation often seems worse and some judges are undoubtedly prosecution minded and I have actually seen a judge interrupt a defence cross-examination to ask his own unrelated questions as it was quite clear that the prosecution witness was about to cave in in respect of his testimony.

Politically the constant clamour for more convictions has seen legal protections for the accused whittled away and more and more obstacles are being placed in the way of the defence. Often the police will take a year or more to prepare their case but defence lawyers can only begin their work when the matter is in the courts and the whole issue is then forced along at a pace dictated not by the needs of the defence but by the determination to bring the matter to trial at the earliest available date regardless of the state of readiness of the defence.

What is needed is more debate by the public on these issues and I hope that this will help encourage that debate. If you have been wrongly arrested by the police let me hear from you.