Hundreds of men each year left with no redress for false rape claims

SIR – To refer to everyone who reports rape as a “victim” is to label every alleged perpetrator a rapist.

Methodologically sound research finds that between 2 per cent and 8 per cent of all rape allegations are false. With 41,150 rape allegations made last year, between 823 and 3,292 allegations would be false.

This means that up to 3,292 men have no real recourse against the false complainant who has caused their lives to be torn apart. The police are reluctant to prosecute for perverting the course of justice or wasting police time in these cases.

It is high time that we stopped calling complainants “victims” and gave anonymity to alleged perpetrators. Wendy Charles-warner

Denbigh

SIR – The solution to the problems relating to the disclosure of unused material in criminal cases will not be found by concentrating on rape and other sexual offences. Disclosure is causing difficulties across the whole spectrum of criminal law.

An effective solution requires the recognition of certain fundamental principles. The 1996 legislation which governs disclosure is a disgrace.

After the revelation in the Seventies and Eighties that the police were manipulating the verdicts in crown court trials by concealing exculpatory material from the court and the defence, the common law had rapidly evolved to deal with the problem by taking away from the police and the prosecution the power to decide what was to be revealed. The defence were given direct access to the fruits of police investigations. That worked.

Sadly, police lobbying and the desire of politicians to appear tough on crime led to the 1996 legislation, which gave back to the police the very powers they had abused.

The idea that police control of unused material can be supervised by an independent Crown Prosecution Service is risible. The CPS lacks lawyers of sufficient calibre or experience to perform such a task. In any event, in an adversarial system of justice the idea that one party can and should be trusted, as some see it, to “help” their adversary is unrealistic.

Recent cases have even cast doubt on the courts’ ability to have faith in the ability of prosecuting QCS to operate the system properly.

We must return as rapidly as possible to the system wrongly scrapped in 1996. Nigel Rumfitt QC

Studham, Bedfordshire

SIR – What seems to be widely accepted as a failure of the disclosure process in these two failed rape prosecutions is not in fact just that.

Is it not actually a failure of the investigation process? Investigation is not always about proving a hypothesis and getting a conviction, it is about finding truth. Given the facts now discovered these two people should never have been charged. David Raynes

Bath, Somerset