News
CJC Doctoral Research Success!
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.
Legal Aid & Access to Legal Representation: Redefining the Right to a Fair Trial
New Publication!
Professor Jackie Hodgson, together with colleagues from Monash (Dr Asher Flynn, Prof Jude McCulloch and Dr Bronwyn Naylor) has a new publication in the Melbourne University Law Review. Comparing the structure of fair trial rights in Victoria, Australia and under the ECHR, the authors argue that legal aid is an essential fair trial right in order ensure that accused persons benefit from the right to legal representation. Access to a lawyer at trial is a well established right in Australia, but less so in the lower courts and not at all during the police detention and questioning of suspects. The right to legal counsel is not meaningful unless supported by public funding and without this, accused persons cannot be said to receive a fair trial. The article is available at: http://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/2099373/06-Flynn-et-al.pdf
The impact of migration on criminal courts in Birmingham
Ana Aliverti is currently wiring up her project on the impact of migration on criminal courts in Birmingham and has written a fantastic blog piece on the matter.
In the blog, she explores the struggles encountered by non-native English speakers and the language barriers such defendants face.
“Language should be a vehicle for communication rather than segregation and marginalisation”.
You can read Ana’s blog here: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2016/07/divided-language
Fair lineups for suspects with distinctive features
New Publication!
Melissa Colloff (PhD student, Psychology), Assistant Professor Kim Wade (Psychology), and Deryn Strange (John Jay College, CUNY) have a new publication. Their paper "Unfair Lineups Make Witnesses More Likely to Confuse Innocent and Guilty Suspects" has just been published in a leading psychology journal, Psychological Science.
In a study containing almost 9000 participants, the authors compare three fair lineup techniques used by the police with unfair lineups in which nothing was done to prevent a distinctive suspect from standing out. The paper highlights the importance of constructing fair lineups for distinctive suspects.
Access the press release here:
Access the paper, here:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/07/21/0956797616655789.abstract
How the timing of police evidence disclosure impacts custodial legal advice
New Publication!
The new publication by Divya Sukumar, Prof. Jackie Hodgson and Assistant Prof. Kim Wade's article on the impact of police evidence on the advice which solicitor's give to client is now available to be read at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298789500_How_the_timing_of_police_evidence_disclosure_impacts_custodial_legal_advice
Presently, the police in England and Wales disclose their evidence at different points during the arrest and detention of a suspect. While the courts have not objected to this, past field research suggests that lawyers can only advise their clients accurately when the police disclose their evidence before the police interview. To examine this from a law/psychology perspective, we recruited 100 criminal defence lawyers to participate in an online study. Lawyers read fictional scenarios and provided custodial legal advice to a hypothetical client (Christopher) when given either pre-interview disclosure or disclosure at various points during the police interview (early, gradually or late). Lawyers given pre-interview disclosure provided considerably more informed legal advice compared to those who were only provided with disclosure during the hypothetical police interview. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this article provides further evidence that pre-interview disclosure is essential for lawyers to deliver case-specific legal advice to suspects.