Understanding and preventing miscarriages of justice
A University of Exeter database is providing data and evidence to help improve the legal system and increase accuracy of convictions.
The Evidence-Based Justice Lab, based at the University of Exeter Law School, is a research group working at the intersection of cognitive psychology, data science, and law. The group’s focus is on better understanding how law and policy interact with human decision-making, for example by examining how law and policy can be used to protect people from pleading guilty when innocent, to enhance evaluations of eyewitness testimony, and to limit the spread of fake news.
A significant part of the team’s work has involved building the UK’s largest database of miscarriages of justice, including case details of almost 500 individual miscarriages of justice over the past 50 years.
Dr Rebecca Helm is an Associate Professor at the University of Exeter Law School and a UKRI future leaders fellow, who has been leading on the project. She says: “It began as a summer project to build the registry, going through legal databases, court reports, and press reports to find information on people who had potentially been wrongfully convicted. Each case was coded in a range of ways, including how the person was convicted and how they successfully appealed, to make searching the registry easy. This means you can easily search the database to find miscarriages of justice with particular characteristics, for example involving a particular cause, a particular offence, or a guilty plea.
“The database is used by legal organisations to help with representation of clients or when mounting campaigns, and also by people who believe they have been wrongly convicted or their family members, to inform their legal challenge.”
The registry helps to build up an understanding of why miscarriages of justice happen so that, where possible, processes and procedures can be changed or created.
Rebecca says: “You can see certain patterns in the data. For example, there used to be much higher numbers of recognised wrongful convictions resulting from false confessions, but as interrogation procedures have changed this number has dropped. We know through extensive research that false confessions are much more likely to occur when defendants have been subject to custodial and interrogative pressure, and are even more likely in juvenile defendants. Over time more is being done to reduce this risk.
“On the other hand, an increasingly important contributor to wrongful convictions is digital forensics. The use of this evidence has increased exponentially over the last twenty years, and lawyers, judges, and jurors aren’t always well equipped to critique it. For example, in the Post Office scandal cases, the Post Office consistently said there couldn’t be a problem with the Horizon computer system (which it later turned out there was a problem with) and defence lawyers didn’t have sufficient access to information to challenge this conclusion. Other types of digital evidence that are often used and are becoming increasingly important in wrongful convictions are cell-site evidence and evidence from text messages or social media, particularly when some messages have been selectively deleted and are not recovered. Being able to see these sort of patterns helps us to develop protocols to prevent the same things happening in future.”
“Using data from existing miscarriages of justice is important in identifying problems with evidence evaluation and legal procedures, and in protecting those interacting with the criminal justice system in the future.”
Following the Post Office scandal, Rebecca, along with Professor Richard Moorhead, Professor of Law and Professional Ethics at Exeter and Karen Nokes, a Lecturer at UCL, are examining, in detail, problems in civil and criminal justice procedures that allowed the scandal to occur. In 2021, it was recognised that a significant number of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses (SPMs) had been blamed for accounting shortfalls that had been generated by errors in the Horizon computing system. These errors had led many SPMs to lose their livelihoods, and even to be convicted of criminal offences and spend time in jail.
The cases raised a number of concerns relating to governance and management at the Post Office and Fujitsu, the conduct of their lawyers, and the operation of the criminal and civil justice systems, including criminal defence practice.
Rebecca says: “The cases offer a seminal opportunity to examine important issues in corporate governance, criminal justice, and professional regulation, as well as government and parliamentary accountability. We have been investigating and analysing all the issues raised, gathering and understanding evidence, and working to ensure that the concerns identified are taken seriously by regulators and policy makers. Some of our initial findings have been influential in the ongoing inquiry into the scandal.”
The Lab’s database has been compiled on the basis of extensive research, but there are wrongful convictions not yet listed, either due to a lack of available information or simply because they have not been discovered yet. Researchers are growing the repository over time and there is the option for lawyers and others to suggest cases to be added if they have information.
Rebecca says: “When people discuss miscarriages of justice in the UK, they often refer to famous cases such as the Guildford Four or Birmingham Six. However, these cases represent the tip of the iceberg and miscarriages of justice still occur quite frequently. Using data from existing miscarriages of justice is important in identifying problems with evidence evaluation and legal procedures, and in protecting those interacting with the criminal justice system in the future.”
