Miscarriage of Justice: Examining Systemic Flaws and Reform Efforts

This essay provides an overview of miscarriages of justice within the UK legal system, highlighting the instances where innocent individuals have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned. It explores the systemic issues contributing to these miscarriages, including problems within the parole system and the denial of justice. The essay examines notable cases like the Birmingham Six and Adolf Beck, illustrating the impact of wrongful convictions and the public demand for investigations. It also analyzes the causes of judicial errors and the need for corrective reforms. Furthermore, it discusses the abolition of capital punishment as a success and the influence of cases like the Guildford Four. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of a clear law enforcement policy and the need for improvements in legislation and the professionalism of legal practitioners to minimize judicial errors.

Miscarriage of Justice

Introduction
 Miscarriages of justice
 The UK prides itself with its upstanding of the legal system in Britain.
While in most cases the system has got the correct judgment in other
instances the innocent have been wrongly imprisoned.
 That is what is called miscarriage of justice. When an innocent person
is wrongly imprisoned or worse lost their lives for a crime they didn’t
commit the justice system is put on the weighing scale.

Notable Problem
 In the UK, a quashed conviction for wrongly convicted person may
lead to compensation for all the time the person went to jail.
 A notable problem in the parole system assumed that all persons
convicted are guilty and should be handled that way (Bingham,
2018).
 For one to be paroled, a convict was to sign in a documented manner
to things that they did or confess to the crime they were convicted for

Birmingham Six
 If a convicted person refuses to sign the declaration form for remorse
they would actually end up spending more time in jail. If genuinely
guilty, the person may end up serving less time that the wrongly
convicted individual who refuses to sign the document.
 An example of a wrongful conviction is the Birmingham Six who were
denied parole for the aforementioned reason. The justice system was
changed in 2005 and to this respect, a handful of inmates got parole
without admitting to guilt.

Appeal to criminal justice
 Miscarriage of justice was a perennial problem that plagued the UK
criminal justice.
 The miscarriages cause agony and anguish to the wrongfully
convicted and their families.
 They act as true pointers that cause flaws in the justice system in the
need of a corrective reforms. Certain appeals have been successful to
show the errors in the criminal justice system

Cont…
 The Birmingham six have been influential in reshaping the system to
have minimum errors in their ruling.
 Such an example that caused the successful changing of the criminal
justice system in wrongful conviction is the case of Adolf Beck who
was wrongly convicted twice of larceny in late nineteenth century and
twentieth century (Beattie, 2016).

Moments of Success
 Another success was witnessed in a defining moment of victory is the
abolition of the capital punishment.
 The case of Timothy Evans, who was executed wrongly for the murder
of His young daughter by the name Geraldine.
 Under police investigations the relevant illustrations show high profile
miscarriages of justice as shown as criminal evidence Act 1984 (Gill,
2019).

Cases
 There are also other cases such as the Gilford Four which relates to
the wrongful conviction of Carole Richardson, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill
and Armstrong Patrick in 1975 for IRA pub bombings in Surrey
Guildford.

Cont…
 Five people were killed in the bombings while more than 100 other
had minor to sever injuries.
 In the Birmingham six case, Hugh Callaghan, paddy Joe, Gerry
Hunter, Johnny walker, Billy power and Richard Mcllekenny where 21
people were killed and 162 injured in the case (Greco, 2016).

Cont…
 These are some of the cases that have showed wrongful convictions
and all. The public demanded for investigations relating to gross
miscarriage of justice and the absolute lack of trust for the criminal
justice system.
 The lack of a clear definition of the concept of “judicial error”, abuse
by the parties of the right to appeal, on the one hand, the
imperfection of the mechanism for correcting judicial errors, on the
other, lead to a collapse of judicial activities to correct judicial errors,
the substitution of this direction of judicial work by unjustified
intervention of higher judicial structures in decisions courts of first
instance (Ha, Caan, and Cassidy, 2016).

Judicial errors
 Judicial errors as a socio-legal phenomenon, the activities of the
courts in their correction are permanently in the prism of scientific
knowledge .
 With regret, we have to admit that the level of knowledge sufficient
for confident work of the courts to identify and eliminate judicial
errors in UK does not yet exist.
 The current situation is due to many reasons. Consider some of them.

Socio-legal Reality
 Such an approach to the problem pulls the court out of the socio-legal
reality, despite the fact that the erroneous work of the courts as an
integral part of the state apparatus is sometimes predetermined by
mistakes in the choice of state policy in general (Hodge, 2019). In this
case, it is completely acceptable to talk about mass deception of
people at the state level.