A piece in the Guardian, Miscarriage of justice watchdog had ‘hole at its heart’, committee chair says. The organisation is the Criminal Cases Review Commission, led by Karen Kneller. The start of the piece:
“Senior management at the miscarriage of justice watchdog were told there was a “hole at the heart” of the organisation as MPs criticised its working from home policy and asked executives if they felt they were the right people to continue leading it.
In an evidence session on Tuesday, the chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), Karen Kneller, was questioned by the cross-party Commons’ justice committee over its failings in the Andrew Malkinson case, her expensive French business courses, and the organisation’s remote working policy, under which, she told them, she worked just one to two days in its Birmingham head office each month.” [J4MB emphasis. An organisation led by a woman with a “working policy” designed to minimise the hours worked by (mainly) women.]
The most notorious recent long-term failing of the CCRC was the Andrew Malkinson case. From the Wikipedia page on the CCRC, it takes up the remainder of this blog piece:
“The CCRC has been criticised for its handling of the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson. [J4MB: He spent 17 in prison years after his wrongful convicion for rape.] The Commission was warned in 2013, as a result of a review in another case, that it should check DNA evidence, but failed to do so. As a result of the failure, Malkinson’s conviction was not quashed until 2023.[31] In July 2024, an independent review of the case concluded that the Commission had failed in the Malkinson case. The Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she was seeking the removal of Helen Pitcher from her position as chair of the Commission.[32] In January 2025, Pitcher resigned. She said she had been made a scapegoat. Malkinson described this comment as “shameless”, and said “I know what it truly is like to be a scapegoat.”[33] After Pitcher’s resignation, Malkinson said action was needed on the Commission to “refresh the whole thing, call it something else, completely dissolve it”.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
“A hole at its heart…” How the wrongful conviction of the Andy Malkinson case, and the insouciance of the Justice Commission remind me of everything which went wrong at the Post Office Horizon scandal, where honesty and competence both appeared to be sadly lacking.
Let’s see… we have Paula Vennels issuing instructions to shred documents about Fujitsu software bugs.
We’ve got Angela van der Bogerd refusing to release key files to Second Sight.
We’ve got Alice Perkins, who chaired the sub-committee which decided to sack Second Sight.
There seems to be a stubborn, selfish preference to abandon truth and due process to the easier option of personal convenience and advantage…. preferring to keep innocent people in jail, so that personal bonuses can be picked up, and we can all pretend that there’s nothing rotten at the heart of the system.
Not only is honesty and competence lacking, but that much-vaunted female ’empathy for others’ seems to have gone missing in action. Again.
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As a link t the parade of female Prison Officers who appear unable to behave professionally, and facilitate crime. Gangs hold such influence over jails ‘it keeps me awake at night’, says Timpson | Prisons and probation | The Guardian Of course no one will dare suggest one helpful move might be to stop employing impressionable young women as officers.
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