Let
Justice
Be Done
A
new television series, ‘The Innocence Project’, follows
a team of ambitious law students fighting for justice where they believe
miscarriages of justice lie uncorrected. The series has parallels with
real-life ‘innocence projects’ in America and in this country,
but how far does fiction meet fact?
JONATHAN KENNEDY investigates…
This autumn ‘The Innocence Project’ will hit our screens
on BBC One, and is the latest series to come from producer Paul Abbott,
whose earlier successes include ‘The Girl in the Café’
and ‘To The Ends Of The Earth’, and follows the fortunes
of a group of law students hand-picked by Professor Jon Ford, played
by Lloyd Owen from BBC’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’. The
students take on cases pro bono (a Latin legal term meaning ‘for
the good’) that nobody else wants to know about; cases that people
have forgotten or have given up on. Talented and with an infectious
enthusiasm, Professor Ford’s team is made up of fresh-faced nineteen-year-olds
who choose to make a difference while still going through the serious
business of growing up, Their job is part investigator, part lawyer
- and all before they’re out of full time education. Sounds like
great TV. But how much of this fiction is fact?
The first
real-life ‘innocence project’ sprang up in America in 1992.
Law students at Yeshiva University in New York began to re-examine old
and forgotten cases with the aim of exonerating wrongfully convicted
individuals through post-conviction DNA evidence. Most of their clients
were poor and without the means to access the often expensive justice
system in the United States and the Yeshiva project offers them free
advice on their cases and since 1992 it has grown to become much more
than a ‘court of last resort’. Yeshiva now helps to organise
a larger Innocence Network of law schools, journalism schools and public
defender offices across America that assists those in prison in trying
to prove their innocence. The project points to mistaken eyewitness
accounts, corrupt scientists, overzealous police and prosecutors, inept
defense counsel, poverty and racial discrimination as common causes
for wrongful conviction, causes that may be as common in America as
they are here. In the first 130 convictions that Yeshiva overturned,
101 were a result of mistaken identity, and to date 183 people have
been exonerated.
The project then spread across to the UK, with the establishment of
the Innocence Network UK at the University of Bristol School of Law
in 2004. Its aims are to raise public awareness of wrongful convictions
as a continuing cause for concern, despite the creation of the Criminal
Cases Review Commission, to facilitate research that identifies the
causes of wrongful convictions in the interests of effecting legal reform
to reduce the occurrence of wrongful convictions, and to encourage the
establishment of Innocence Projects within universities in the UK. “Our
system of justice is not about the objective truth of a suspect or defendant’s
guilt or innocence. Adversarial justice is a contest, regulated by principles
of due process; compliance with the rules and procedures of the legal
system. During the legal process, errors can be made, and forms of malpractice
occur, with the result that some guilty offenders will be acquitted
and some innocent people will be wrongly convicted,” explains
the network’s website.
“The
Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body set up in the wake
of notorious cases such as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six,
was not designed to rectify the errors of the system and ensure that
the innocent overturn their wrongful convictions…A particular
problem then is that even if the CCRC have evidence that indicates that
an applicant is innocent, but this evidence was available at the original
trial, the case may not be referred to the Court of Appeal…Against
this background, the Innocence Network UK (INUK) is a university-based
initiative that derives from the observation that academic research
on the causes of wrongful convictions is an essential part of realising
corrective reform of the criminal justice system.”
Peter Wolfenden,
a law graduate from Manchester University and now starting bar school,
was involved with Manchester’s pro bono legal advice centre as
an undergraduate and says he’s impressed with the new BBC series.
“I got to spend part of a day on the set and I was really surprised
at the way it had been set up. I spoke to one of the actresses and told
her that it was just like a room that I could sit down and work in,
it was quite realistic… As an undergraduate, when you realise
that your advice could have a material bearing on someone’s life
instead of just answering an abstract academic problem, it drives home
what you aim to do in practice in your career.”
Has he seen
any success stories in his work so far? “There are a few cases
in the pipeline. We deal with a variety of cases. There was recently
an unfair dismissal case which involved quite substantial damages, and
the centre is currently working on appeals against convictions for attempted
murder, one of which could be heard before the Court of Appeal next
year.”
And with
another innocence project under way at Cardiff University’s School
of Law and interest in INUK programmes at Aberystwyth, Nottingham Law
School, Reading and Warwick it would seem the message of righting legal
wrongs may take hold at law schools across the country, and just not
confined to the televisual comforts of our living rooms.
innocencenetwork.org.uk
