Miscarriages Of Justice

Fact-finding, Legal Culture and Miscarriages of Justice: a Preliminary Analysis From England and Wales

STEWART FIELD, from the CARDIFF UNIVERSITY, CARDIFF LAW SCHOOL, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Criminal Justice and Human Rights,” under the title “Fact-finding, Legal Culture and Miscarriages of Justice: a Preliminary Analysis From England and Wales”. Here is the abstract: This paper sets out some preliminary thoughts in what it is hoped will develop into a comparative analysis of fact-finding in criminal process and its relationship to miscarriages of justice. Wrongful convictions often derive from pre-trial failures to make connections between apparently disparate facts that could have strengthened alternative defence narratives and weakened the prosecution ‘story’ at trial. Cultural and institutional pre-trial relations in England and Wales between police, prosecutor and defence lawyers are shaped by modern re-interpretations (or subversions) of adversarial procedural assumptions which make such failures inevitable. Yet defence failure to exploit existing but implicit connections between facts will only be grounds for appeal in blatant cases of individual incompetence. This fails to acknowledge the way that structural weaknesses in fact-finding practices lead to failures to exploit the potential of information (by the making of connections) for which the defendant cannot be fairly blamed.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

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Further Reading

• “Fact-finding, Legal Culture and Miscarriages of Justice: a Preliminary Analysis From England and Wales”, by STEWART FIELD (Proceedings)