News

Next week, Jackie Hodgson - with the assistance of her PhD student, Divya Sukumar - will be training over 80 officers from Greater Manchester Police on safeguards for young suspects during police interrogation. This training session flows from Jackie's participation in a large-scale, EU-funded research project in collaboration with colleagues from four other jurisdictions.

More information on the research project is available on the Criminal Justice Centre website.

The second volume on safeguards for young suspects has been published. It is the result of a large-scale research project funded by the European Union and with the participation of researchers from five jurisdictions, including Prof Jackie Hodgson. The project consists of a comparative empirical study of the different legal procedural safeguards in place in Belgium, England and Wales, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands.

The first part of the research project resulted in the publication of 'Interrogating Young Suspects - Procedural Safeguards from a Legal Perspective' (Panzavolta, M., de Vocht, D., Van Oosterhout, M. and Vanderhallen, M. (eds) (2015) Intersentia). The second volume has now been published: 'Interrogating Young Suspects: Procedural Safeguards from an Empirical Perspective' (Panzavolta, M., de Vocht, D., Van Oosterhout, M. and Vanderhallen, M. (eds) (2016) Intersentia). This second volume contains the results of the empirical research conducted in the five Member States consisting of focus group interviews and observations of recorded interrogations. These country reports are followed by an integrated analysis and a set of guidelines.

Both volumes are available on the project website under project publications http://youngsuspects.eu

Karim, one of our postgraduate students, interviewed Jackie Hodgson last May about the Criminal Justice Centre. Many thanks to Sara Prestleton for organising this! Watch the video here:

Congratulations to Natalie Kyneswood who won the Middle Temple Lechmere Essay Prize for an essay she wrote on the Human Rights Act and the proposed British Bill of Rights. It was judged by Master of the Bench, Professor Dawn Oliver QC, Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law at University College London.

The judge described the essay as presenting a 'clear explanation of the unpopularity of the HRA and considers that an alternative 'British Bill of Rights' would be no more popular, and that arguments for such a change are misconceived...'. She found the essay to have 'a neat turn of phrase...well backed up by parliamentary, political and academic references' and a 'mature and intelligent' argument.

You can read Natalie's essay at: http://www.middletemple.org.uk/education-and-training/scholarships-and-prizes/essay-prizes/lechmere

CJC members Jackie Hodgson and Kevin Hearty have secured funding for the Centre for Operational Police Research with colleagues from other departments.

Professors Jackie Hodgson, Neil Stewart (Psychology) and Carsten Maple (WMG) have secured £40,000 from Warwick Strategic Impact Fund for collaborative work with the Metropolitan Police Service. The funding is set to help develop a network of academics and active police staff and officers around three central research projects.

Professor Jackie Hodgson and Dr Kevin Hearty, along with Associate Professor Kim Wade and Professor Neil Stewart (Psychology), have also secured £20,000 from the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account to collaborate with West Mercia and Warwickshire Police. The funded project: “We don’t buy crime” will develop and evaluate the impact of Smartwater technology and other preventive interventions on public confidence in and satisfaction with the policing of burglary.