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The last year has seen the award of PhDs to three Criminal Justice Centre researchers carrying out empirical work. Under the supervision of Prof Jackie Hodgson, each student conducted observations and interviews at court and with legal practitioners, as well as in other jurisdictions and with the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Yu Mou's PhD thesis 'Written Evidence and the Absence of Witnesses: The Inevitability of Conviction in Chinese Criminal Justice' draws on insights from empirical data gathered during her observations in a prosecutor's office in China for a period of six months in 2012 and 2013, and semi-structured interviews with 28 legal actors (including 7 police officers, 7 prosecutors, 7 judges and 7 defence lawyers, from 8 different regions of China). It approaches the Chinese criminal process from an internal perspective of the criminal justice system and outlines the strategic inter-relationships between key legal actors, the deep-seated legal culture embedded in legal practice and the structural injustices that follow. The thesis follows the investigative dossier in the criminal process---how it is constructed, scrutinised and used to dispose of cases and convict defendants in lieu of witnesses' oral testimony---as its focal point. It systematically analyses the functional deficiency of the Chinese criminal justice system, which fails to prevent innocent individuals from being wrongly accused and convicted. It examines the legal culture shaped by managerial mechanisms of institutions and the extent to which changes to the formal legal structure have influenced legal practice. The findings reveal that the political regime demands that the criminal justice system serves mainly as a state apparatus of social control, which has been framed through performance indicators, bureaucratic management, and the central value of collectivism in such a way as to maintain the stability of the authoritarian power.

Laurène Soubise’s PhD thesis ‘Prosecutorial discretion and accountability – A comparative study of France and England and Wales’ bases its analysis upon direct observations and interviews in the two jurisdictions under study. It endeavours to understand how the French and Anglo-Welsh criminal justice systems attempt to combine the necessities of accountability for public prosecution services in modern democratic societies with the flexibility and reactivity needed in the application of the law provided by prosecutorial discretion. The thesis argues that neither system observed achieves a satisfactory balance between accountability and discretion for public prosecutors. In France, although democratic and hierarchical accountability channels are well developed in theory, oversight is weak due to the primacy of the concept of ‘adaptation’ in the legal culture and the strong professional ethos of procureurs as independent judicial officers. In England and Wales, public prosecutors are part of a highly bureaucratic and centralised structure, which strictly enforces consistency in prosecutorial decisions at the expense of much discretion and autonomy for individual prosecutors whose responsibility is limited to narrow and repetitive tasks due to the segmentation of the prosecution process. This overbearing accountability structure, coupled with a historical balance of power in favour of the police, appears to prevent prosecutors from making decisions perceived as unpopular with their hierarchy or the police. Finally, pressure on resources and a drive for efficiency in both jurisdictions have resulted in the bureaucratisation of the criminal justice process with part of the prosecution workload being delegated to unqualified staff and minor cases being processed as quickly as possible into a one-size-fits-all system.

Juliet Horne’s PhD thesis, ‘A Plea of Convenience: An Examination of the Guilty Plea in England and Wales’, combines empirical research and theoretical analysis in assessing how the appeal courts and the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) respond to challenges to guilty plea convictions and the accounts of the guilty plea they provide to justify these responses. Juliet’s empirical research included an examination of CCRC files in guilty plea cases, an observational study of defence plea advice and hearings, and interviews with lawyers and CCRC staff in order to assess whether the accounts offered by the courts and the CCRC have any foundation in practice. The research reveals that the criminal justice system, as designed and operated, prioritises efficiency over fairness and accuracy in its treatment of guilty pleas. Despite the consequent risk of injustice, the appeal courts resist challenges to guilty plea convictions, relying on unsupportable accounts of the guilty plea as a confession, and of defence lawyers as sheltering defendants from plea pressures. In turn, the CCRC’s approach to such cases is characterised by confusion and, ultimately, the prioritisation of efficiency and finality. In response to these problems, Juliet proposes an account of the guilty plea as the defendant’s prediction of the likely trial outcome (the ‘defendant-assessed verdict’). While requiring procedural changes to allow defendants to be supported and informed in assessing the case, this account could provide a justification for guilty plea convictions (which account for around 90% of criminal convictions) and offer a framework for assessing challenges to such convictions in the future.