When Ludovic Kennedy died last autumn, every obituary rightly paid tribute to his book, Ten Rillington Place, which told the story of Timothy Evans, the illiterate Welsh lorry driver wrongly convicted and hanged in 1950 for the murder of his child. There have been other admirable books on individual cases of miscarriages of justice since then, notably those by the late Paul Foot and the journalist Bob Woffinden, and by victims themselves. Few, however, have packed the punch of Rillington Place, which punctured national complacency about the judicial system.
Eventually, in the wake of the scandalous cases of the Guildford four, the Birmingham six, the Maguire seven, Judith Ward and the rest, a decision was made to move the handling of alleged wrongful convictions from the Home Office to a new body, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which was set up in 1997. Has it made the work of such people as Kennedy and Foot unnecessary?
Certainly not, according to this book. Edited by Michael Naughton and with contributions from many of the lawyers (Michael Mansfield QC, Campbell Malone, Glyn Maddocks) and academics (Michael Zander, Richard Nobles, Clive Walker) who have been active in the field, the book examines the work and efficacy of the commission. Naughton is a senior law lecturer at Bristol university and founded the Innocence Network UK (INUK) in 2004 to link up the growing number of university-based Innocence Projects, in which students re-examine doubtful convictions; the basis of the book is INUK's symposium on the CCRC held two years ago. The conclusion is a stark one: that the body has failed in its remit, that too many innocent people still languish in jail, that reviews are painfully slow and shackled by narrow legal interpretations and that the media has taken its eye off the ball. "It is clear . . . that the CCRC is not the solution to the wrongful conviction of the innocent," is the damning verdict.
Maddocks and Gabe Tan, lawyers who have battled with many such cases, suggest that an innocent person's chances at the CCRC depend to a great degree on luck. "If a good, committed and experienced CRM (case review manager) is allocated to a case with merit but which requires considerable investigative input, and what could be called a dogged determination to get to the heart of the case, the chances of a referral (back to the Court of Appeal) are exponentially increased."
Malone, whose dogged determination helped to free Stefan Kiszko, argues that the CCRC is often too cautious in its referrals. Of the 12,175 applications received since it started, only 407 have been sent back to the Court of Appeal, of which 287 have been quashed. He also finds their approach "worryingly inconsistent". The point is also made that innocent people in jail face "significant penalties" if they refuse to acknowledge guilt, which is a condition for admission to many of the training programmes that would lead to a swifter release.
Naughton suggests that the CCRC's establishment "encouraged an erosion of media interest in the wrongful conviction of the innocent in the widespread belief that the CCRC was the appropriate body to deal with them". But is that the real reason? The two excellent TV programmes that investigated such cases, the BBC's Rough Justice and Channel 4's Trial and Error, were both victims of an economic and cultural climate that preferred cheaper, less challenging fare; why spend six-figure sums on a painstaking documentary about a gloomy subject when what is laughingly known as "reality TV" comes so much cheaper?
The book presents a strong and passionate prosecution case against the CCRC. What is missing is the argument for the other side. For that, readers can turn to guardian.co.uk/uk/series/justice-on-trial where David Jessel, who presented Rough Justice and Trial and Error programmes before becoming a commissioner himself, mounts a robust defence of the commission's work and an implicit and highly critical analysis of Naughton's thesis.
The literature of wrongful conviction is a long one, stretching back to Voltaire and Zola. This book does not pretend to compete on that level (incidentally, why the prohibitive price of £55 for a volume of 300-odd pages?), but if it generates greater interest and debate inside the government, the judiciary and, yes, the media, it will have fulfilled an important function on behalf of the many – and there are many of them – innocent people behind bars.
Duncan Campbell's If It Bleeds is published by Headline Review.