All are innocent until proven guilty
An ancient maxim underpins the rule of law in this country. It states that it is better for 10 guilty people to walk free from court than one innocent person to go to prison. In legal circles this has come to be known as Blackstone’s formulation, after the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone. Does the criminal justice system subscribe to this any longer? Judging by the revelation from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that vital evidence was withheld from the defence in at least 47 cases of alleged rape and sexual assault, the answer appears to be no.
This is a scandal every bit as serious as the police doctoring evidence during investigations against suspected IRA bombers in the Seventies, or conspiring to falsify statements after the Hillsborough disaster, though there is little of the liberal outrage that accompanied either of those. Why is that? A miscarriage of justice is a miscarriage of justice; yet where it involves men accused of rape the same rules do not seem to apply.
This, indeed, has been the problem all along. A succession of acquittals in rape cases led politicians to conclude that men were getting away with criminal behaviour, as many no doubt were. The law was amended in a bid to clarify the circumstances in which consent could reasonably be said to have been given.
But in many cases of so-called “date rape”, where the alleged victim and accused knew each other and it was the word of one against the other, juries remain reluctant to convict. It is hard not to conclude that under pressure to increase conviction rates, the police and prosecutors simply withheld evidence that would help the defence, in order to make a successful prosecution more likely.
Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, launched an investigation last year after a series of trials collapsed, due to the late disclosure of relevant material to the defence. She said yesterday that “getting disclosure right is a fundamental part of a fair criminal justice system … In the vast majority of cases we are doing that – but there are cases where we are falling short, and that is unacceptable.”
But how many are there; and how many people have ended up in prison as a result? This is not some trifling technical matter but the consequence of a pernicious culture that has set aside one of the basic tenets of the criminal justice system, that everyone, whatever the alleged crime, is innocent until proven guilty.