University innocence projects: where are they now?

This article titled “University innocence projects: where are they now?” was written by Jon Robins, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 27th April 2016 09.28 UTC

Law students and academics from across England and Wales met at Cardiff University recently to mark the 10-year anniversary of its innocence project and discuss their work on arguably the most complex and intractable cases in our legal system. At the height of the so-called innocence movement, some 30 universities were assisting alleged victims of miscarriages of justice to clear their names.

It is almost 12 years since the pioneering University of Bristol innocence project launched and only one conviction has been overturned on the strength of a university application.

False hope?

At a breakout session at the Cardiff conference, students were considering the many and, all too often, insurmountable challenges of such work. A question posed for consideration by the students was: Do innocence projects create false hope?

“Prisoners place their hope in us. We are their last resort,” reflected one student. Another, from a different university, told a sad but familiar story of a prisoner’s partner at the end of their tether approaching a website claiming to specialise in criminal appeals. They were insisting on £60,000 upfront before they would even look at it. “They were about to re-mortgage their house. The prisoner might well have been innocent, but realistically the prospect of a successful appeal was slim,” she said.

The wrongly convicted have few places to turn for help. Only a handful of lawyers are prepared to take on such poorly paid cases (legal aid rates, frozen for years, were cut last year by 8.75%); and the miscarriage watchdog is as chronically underfunded as it is massively over-subscribed. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has borne a greater share of the austerity cuts than any other part of the criminal justice system. Over the last 10 years its budget has been cut by one third in real terms and its workload has increased by 70%.

Disarray

The innocence movement itself has been in a state of disarray following the 2014 disbanding of the umbrella group Innocence Network UK. Its outspoken founder Dr Michael Naughton unilaterally pulled the plug on the scheme, accusing some universities of jumping on the bandwagon, using projects as “a recruiting tool” to attract students to their courses and playing lip service to its main mission of overturning convictions.

But before that, some universities had abandoned the network over concerns about a lack of democratic accountability, and a genuinely radical and exciting project had become mired in infighting.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that I interviewed the CCRC chair Richard Foster last month. When asked about the value of university projects, he said: “If you think that you have a terminal illness, would you rather have your case considered by medical students in the bar on Friday night – or would you rather send it to a consultant oncologist?”

Foster’s comments were insensitive – as he has (sort of) conceded – but he also has a point. According to the CCRC, innocence projects have only made around 25 applications; they have come from just six universities; and one, Cardiff, has been responsible for more than half of the total. Cardiff was also the first university UK to successfully have a case referred to the court of appeal (Dwaine George’s conviction was overturned in December 2014).

Battling the odds

What’s going on? “The CCRC is judging university projects on what applications have been made, but there are other ways of looking at this. The figures might not tell the whole story,” says Holly Greenwood, 28, a PhD student from Cardiff who has been working on their innocence project for seven years. Her ESRC-funded research is on the rise and fall of the innocence movement.

“The people who come to us are often those who have been rejected by lawyers and the CCRC. So we’re starting from a difficult point,” she says.

The odds are as massively stacked against success for the CCRC as much for anyone else. Last year the Birmingham-based CCRC received 1,599 applications but only referred 36 cases back to the court of appeal – that’s 2.2% of the total number. Prisoners in denial don’t get parole or better conditions – they can’t all be making it up. A point made by the Guardian’s Eric Allison recently: “It just doesn’t make sense that so many would make false claims.”

The CCRC (and universities) have to operate in a criminal justice system with a court of appeal that fails to get to grips with miscarriage cases. Such concerns were echoed by many of the witnesses who appeared before last year’s House of Commons’ justice committee on the CCRC. The commission had become “a filtering body” that provided “an extra barrier and reinforcement of the traditional intransigence of the court of appeal”, write Dr Dennis Eady and Professor Julie Price of Cardiff’s innocence project, in a submission co-signed by 18 academics, plus campaigners and lawyers.

The MPs seemingly accepted the point and called on the Law Commission to review the court of appeal’s grounds for allowing appeals. However, Michael Gove, the justice secretary and lord chancellor, rejected the recommendation.

Regrouping

The recent conference at Cardiff saw a regrouping of the university casework movement. There might have been an upheaval but those universities that are sticking with the concept are committed to this important work and to exploring different, more effective ways of operating.

For example, six universities are piloting a collaboration with the new lawyer-led Centre for Criminal Appeals (CCA) and Essex University is working with Inside Justice, a unit set up by the prisoners’ newspaper Inside Time, to investigate miscarriages in 2010.

Emily Bolton, the CCA’s founder, set up the Innocence Project New Orleans, which has so far freed 25 innocent prisoners. “It’s all about time,” she says. “The quality of decisions made by the court of appeal is dictated by how much time has been spent investigating what went wrong in the case beforehand.

“Students’ energy and enthusiasm undoubtedly needs to be harnessed by the innocence movement,” she says. “However, this needs to be supervised and guided by full-time investigators, researchers, lawyers or journalists.” It is no coincidence that Cardiff University – the one university with a full time case-worker, Dennis Eady – has made the highest number of applications to the CCRC.

Student views

And what do students get out of appeals work? “It inspired me to want to become a criminal defence lawyer. It was something that I could get passionate about,” says Chris Musgrave, 22, a law student at the University of Sheffield. He has been working on the case of Susan May, who was convicted of murdering her aunt but who always protested her innocence and whose case has been highlighted by the Guardian over the years. “Her innocence just seems so glaringly obvious. It has been fascinating, at times harrowing,” he says.

Musgrave recently spent three months at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, run by Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. In his final year as an undergraduate, he wrote a research paper looking at the different approaches to miscarriages of justice in the US and UK. His conclusion? “We have a system that goes some way to maintaining miscarriages of justice, almost actively, through these really high hurdles to get a conviction overturned,” he says.

Musgrave calls Richard Foster’s recent comments disheartening. “I have never reviewed a case at the bar. I don’t know any student at any university who has ever taken this work lightly.”

Bolton believes it has become increasingly clear that the CCRC is not able to put the necessary time into the cases it reviews. “Our guess is that they might average 50 hours work on a strong case, strung out over two years,” she says. “If I was a cancer patient, I wouldn’t want my consultant oncologist appointments spread so thinly.”

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