A piece by David Brown (Chief News Correspondent) and Frances Gibb (Legal Editor), starting on the front page of today’s Times. Emphases ours.
Rapists will get away with their crimes because police and prosecution failings have undermined public confidence in the justice system, the former head of the judiciary has warned.
Juries could be deterred from convicting in future sexual assault trials because they would not have faith in evidence placed before the court, Lord Judge said. The former lord chief justice spoke out after The Times exposed how four rape trials had collapsed after crucial evidence was disclosed only at the last minute. He described the disclosure failings in all four cases as alarming and deeply troublesome.
Oliver Mears, 19, an Oxford student, was cleared of rape yesterday after spending two years on bail. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Surrey police, which handed over relevant evidence days before his trial was due, were criticised by the case judge and ordered to explain in writing the “completely unnecessary” delays.
The development came as:
• Surrey police followed Scotland Yard in reviewing all current rape cases. [J4MB: All police forces should be doing the same, then reviewing all convictions going back at least five years.]
• Police and prosecutors admitted failing to hand over vital digital evidence in a rape trial for the fourth time in a month.
• Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, faced criticism over her handling of disclosure issues.
Lord Judge, who was the most senior judge in England and Wales in 2008-13 and remains an influential judicial figure in the House of Lords, said that the failings over disclosure of evidence were “deeply worrying” because of the possible impact on juries. [J4MB: So, not worrying because innocent men are being sent to prison, and have been for years?]
“The recent examples in cases involving alleged sexual crime are alarming, both for all the individuals concerned and for public confidence in the administration of criminal justice generally,” he told The Times. “It is at least possible that from time to time juries, alarmed as everyone else by these cases, may wonder, even in an apparently strong case, whether they have been provided with all the admissible evidence. These events may reduce the prospects of conviction even when the allegation is genuine.” [J4MB: On the bright side, it will also reduce the prospects of conviction when the allegation is false.]
Delays in cases, with some suspects or defendants awaiting charge for nearly two years, were also unacceptable and caused “unnecessary suffering to all involved”, [J4MB: Other than the many women making false accusations] he said. Lord Judge called for a swift investigation into the failure to disclose evidence, and also into the delays in the charging of suspects by the CPS.
The criticisms will increase pressure on Ms Saunders, who was criticised after saying on Thursday that innocent men were not in jail, despite admitting “systemic issues” in disclosing evidence to defence lawyers. Anna Soubry, a former minister who described Ms Saunders as “part of the problem”, was supported by her fellow Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, who wrote: “The blundering CPS is responsible for a catalogue of appalling injustices.”
Ms Saunders had said that police need not check social media accounts fully when investigating allegations of rape. This is despite failures to hand over digital media being at the centre of three previous rape trial collapses, including that last month of the student Liam Allan, 22, which led to political and public concern about rape cases.
Jon Savell, Surrey police’s head of public protection, admitted yesterday that flaws in the Mears investigation included a detective failing to “examine the victim’s [J4MB: The victim here was Mears, not the complainant] digital media during the initial stages of the investigation or follow what we would consider to be a reasonable line of inquiry”. He added that the review of all the force’s rape cases was to “ensure that investigations are thorough, timely, effective and compliant with policy and guidelines”.
Yesterday Judge Jonathan Black formally found Mr Mears, from Horley, Surrey, not guilty of rape and an indecent assault. The CPS had denied on Thursday that the case had collapsed because of a “disclosure issue” but the prosecutor ordered by the judge to attend Guildford crown court to explain the decision not to offer evidence admitted that key information had not been handed over by police until last week. [J4MB: So it WAS a disclosure issue, the CPS were lying yet again.] Sarah Lindop, for the prosecution, told the judge: “This case is old and it was quite old when it came in to the hands of the CPS and I do not know the reason for that. Further material was obtained and was reviewed in a case that was finely balanced.”
Judge Black said: “It seems that if this was a case that was as finely balanced as you say it was, there have been unnecessary delays in investigating [and] what seems to be a completely unnecessary last-minute decision.
“Oliver Mears and the complainant have had this matter hanging over their heads for more than two years in circumstances that, if their investigation had been carried out properly in the first place, we would not have been in this position.”
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Justice for Men & Boys 
It is remarkable how quickly “false allegations against men” has transmogrified into “villainous men may go free”, thus being a threat to victimised women – rather than a threat to innocent men. The narrative which is emerging is that no one should have pointed out the failures of the system to identify evidence – because juries may be losing the confidence they need in the system to convict. But this can only be so by virtue of their confidence previously being unfounded. Staggering. It is not as if these cases illustrate a failure to find prosecution evidence. In all these cases it is exculpatory evidence which has been revealed only at the last minute. The very obvious implication is that there must be many cases where this exculpatory evidence was never revealed at all. But apparently it is in bad taste to mention this lest it has a “dampening effect” on juries’ willingness to convict in future.
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‘The narrative which is emerging is that no one should have pointed out the failures of the system to identify evidence – because juries may be losing the confidence they need in the system to convict.‘
The narrative isn’t new; judges have expressed such sentiments for a long time. I can’t remember which law lord it was, perhaps the odious Denning or the equally repellent Hailsham, perhaps both, perhaps some other, however, someone eminent in the law once said, and not too long ago, that it is better to hang a thousand innocent men than to let one guilty man go free (seriously – I’m not making that up). Another statement from a similar if not the same source, apropos the exoneration of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, was that if we’d had the death penalty none of that fuss would have been necessary.
Judges seem to care more that the judicial system is not held in popular contempt than that it actually dispenses justice.
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I seem to remember Denning was an “enlightened” guy who was all for a compassionate approach to sentencing, until his own home was burgled, that is, and then he morphed into a modern Judge Jeffries.
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Haha. Why am I not surprised?
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Actually, you’ve got a point there. It’s always been innocent men (from the lower orders, mind) that have been used as fodder to feed an incurably corrupt system and it’s been going on for much longer. The internet, where we are right now, is finally providing some real pushback. But yes, it goes further than lying women being found out after they have destroyed countless lives, which apparently is dangerous. They are just using a system that was already broken, to their advantage.
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‘Rapists will get away with their crimes because … ‘
… juries are aware that no evidence of guilt means no guilt.
‘Rapists will get away with their crimes … ‘
… just as false rape accusers have been getting away with them for centuries, probably millennia.
That aside, does anyone else smell the beginning of a campaign to do away with jury trials in rape and sexual assault cases?
May I presume upon our host’s hospitality to put up a link to a Facebook page I have created titled Sack Alison Saunders.
https://www.facebook.com/SackAlisonSaunders/
I willingly admit to having little to no clue how to go about developing such things and welcome any and all relevant and useful advice.
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PS: I’ve now set up a Facebook group with the same title, and tweeted #sackalisonsaunders.
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The big fear of the government is that false accusers will be exposed…. never mind the accused men…
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And by exposing them showing how big this problem really is. It will kill their misandrist narrative stone dead.
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Disgustingly missing the point as usual; society just doesn’t give the same weight to male suffering as female. All the concern as usual, is how it might affect women, but it is innocent men who are standing around with these accusations hanging over their heads for years at a time.
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And who are in Gaol. In my dreams this would lead to a review of past cases, even recent ones. I’m sure there would be more and more “suspect” cases found. Firstly to at least give the possibility of such men to mount an appeal, but also to get a grip on the “systemic” nature of the corruption of Police and CPS duties.
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So let me see if I understand this correctly. Juries and the uncorrupted part of the professional judiciary are preventing further perversion of the course of justice by the police, the CPS (led by an odious ideologue who is sublimely disinterested in the integrity of the justice system) and the corrupted parts of the professional judiciary, right? And according to The Times this is proof that rape trials are in peril?
Hello, clown headline writers at The Times! Innocent men went to jail because crucial evidence was withheld!!! That apparently does not concern you. That the bent head of the CPS has no problem with this comes as no surprise but that you bend Lord Judge’s words to suit your own identity political agenda…ah well…it’s par for the course when you think about it. Anyway, we’re hear to help you restore sanity in a system that’s clearly careening off the rails. If that does not concern you, then you’re part of the problem.
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I wonder what has been the “impact on juries” of decades of TV drama portraying men as evil rapists and women as brave but helpless victims?
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