Quote from: JackiePreece on Today at 07:47 PM
"These people were acting in a professional capacity trying to establish whether or not a MoJ had occurred.
Can you provide any evidence showing they believed your late husband was innocent. I assume you believed your late husband was innocent or you wouldn't have married him"?
"What a thoughtful piece. What surprises me is how little media sneering there has been, and I’ve been trying to work out why. My sad conclusion is that it is yet another reflecton of the fact that miscarriages of justice have fallen so far off the public and media radar that we aren’t worth a story even when we get it wrong.
I don’t think it is right to put that down to the ending of programmes like Rough Justice and Trial and Error – their demise was the consequence of this apathy; the people who commission television these days just don’t ‘get’ these concerns – and if they do, they regard them, as did one head of Channel 4, as ‘rather eighties’. Civics is not top of the list in today’s media world. Maybe it’s because the Irish cases are no longer fresh; maybe it’s because emphasis on the victims of crime leaves less room for the concern over the victims of justice; maybe it’s because the CCRC is deemed to be there to put things right; maybe it’s because Thatcher’s children now run the media playground; maybe people have legitimate, new social, moral or political concerns; maybe because fewer people will have concerns about historic or intrafamilial child sex cases after the odious Savile.
My CCRC friends tell me that this just shows how ‘unsafety’ rather than innocence should be the criterion. I’ve never bought that. Such a view simply entrenches that bloodless tendency which reduces injustice to the formulaic, tick box exercise so comfortable for lawyers (one extremely grand lawyer believed the CCRC should be ‘the anteroom to the Court of Appeal’) I wanted to refer Simon Hall because I believed (wrongly) that he didn’t do it. I know it’s not very lawyerly, but I’m rather less interested in giving the guilty a get-out-of-jail-free card. Speaking only for myself, I think if I was incapable of imagining the plight of someone (Sally Clark, anyone?) who had lost freedom, family, hope for something he or she had not done…. then I might have gone into advertising instead.
It is a lesson for INUK that you always have to reserve a part of your brain for the possibility that the person you campaign for just might be guilty. A belief in innocence is vital, but not to the exclusion of key critical faculties. I’d like to hear from Michael Naughton on this.
So where do we all go from here – especially in a climate where more innocent people are likely to end up in prison? What’s needed is some sort of breakthrough in a whole category of cases; just as matters such as convictions based on identification, duff forensics or confessions made an impact that went beyond individual cases, so, perhaps, getting together behind those who have made the running on something like Shaken Baby Syndrome might be helpful in bringing home the double tragedy of bereavement and injustice. We have a tendency, us lot – and Julie has done us a service by laying it bare – to be proprietorial about our cases; a Jeremy Bamberite may not be on speaking terms with a Susan Mayite , an Eddie Gilfoylite may be mocked by a Brian Parsonsite. If we put our collective weight behind a class or category of miscarriage of justice – and we all know that many babies aren’t killed in the way it’s claimed, but sadly the best our honest defence experts can say is ‘we just don’t know how it happens’ – then this may be a way forward.
http://thejusticegap.com/2013/09/simon-hall-confession-a-time-to-take-stock/