One of the most frustrating things about our flawed justice system is that once convicted of a crime, it assumed that the jury got it right and maintaining one’s innocence is seen as denying guilt. Well, yes, you damned well will deny it if you are not guilty. But to be further punished for maintaining your innocence is a disgrace.
A man whose rape conviction has been overturned after a 20-year fight has said the past two decades felt like he had been “kidnapped by the state”.
Well, yes, precisely that is exactly what happened. I have no faith in the system that if I was accused that I would walk free at the end of a trial. And I would never plead guilty to a crime I have not committed just to make it easy for the bastards.
However, he served a further 10 years in jail after his tariff expired.
This is an outrageous fucking disgrace and someone, somewhere, should pay for that.
His barrister Edward Henry KC told the court this was because Mr Malkinson would never “falsely confess to abhorrent crimes which he did not commit”.
This is the catch 22. If you are innocent you are punished more because you won’t confess and if you are innocent, of course you won’t confess. This needs to change.
Police also apologised for what they described as a “grave miscarriage of justice”.
Not fucking good enough.
Quite fucking right
So his appeal succeeded when “fresh” evidence appeared.
DNA evidence showed it was somebody else. DNA evidence that was always there presumably.
So why did it just turn up and where was it for the previous 20 years?
“Police also apologised…..”
Oh that’s alright then!
Incompetence or malice, but will we ever find out?
’This is an outrageous fucking disgrace and someone, somewhere, should pay for that.’
Rightly or wrongly (and I agree with you, it’s wrong on principle) it’s the current law of the land. So who, exactly, should pay?
The jury members who voted to convict?
The CPS for pushing the case despite forensic breakthroughs yet to be made at the time?
The Greater Manchester Police are responsible for the initial fail. It is their ‘evidence’ that the jury would convict on and also the basis for the CPS pushing the case.
If an innocent person is convicted, then the evidence is flawed, incomplete, withheld, fabricated or merely circumstantial. An innocent person should never have enough evidence against them to meet the reasonable doubt threshold – because they are innocent. Someone in GMP needs to spend 17 years inside because of this.
What really winds me up about this is that if someone maintains their innocence, they are denied parole because they have failed to offer contrition for their crimes. At no point in the process is there a place for ‘maybe there’s something in this.’ We have enough cases of miscarriage of justice to at least allow for doubt. Certainly parole should not be dependent on having to admit guilt. But no, we are faced with pig-headed, obstinate adherence to the assumption of guilt no matter what and the innocent being further punished for being innocent. Kafka couldn’t make it up.
That’s the fundamental issue: assumption of guilt.
It’s a variation of US style plea bargaining, something else intended to “smooth” the whole justice process.
The problem with plea bargaining is that an assumption of guilt is intrinsic.
It then becomes basically like a court martial. There fundamentally is no real question of innocence, it’s just a case of determining the sentence.
The decision to prosecute is the guilty/not guilty gateway.
A protestation of innocence is almost tantamount to a confession!
This is wrong, wrong, wrong!
If you read the “inter alia” of the appeal it looks like there’s more to this than just new DNA techniques finding the real criminal.
Looks like evidence was withheld from the defence at the original trial, but that’s still subject to further review. It may not have made any difference, but still.
“Police also apologised for what they described as a “grave miscarriage of justice”.”
Is that it? An apology? If there was anyone deserving of compensation, it’s this guy. He’s had almost 20 years of his life stolen from him (which he won’t get back) for a crime he didn’t commit.
And that compensation needs to come out of the pension pots of the officers involved.
This practice of not releasing innocent people who refuse to admit their guilt has been around for quite a while. Really the policy should have been reviewed the first time a person was interred for longer and then later found not guilty. Given that the justice system is far from infallible, it strikes me as being a stupid policy right off the bat.
It’s not just stupid, it is malicious.
It isn’t good enough and what’s disturbing is the inane reassurance ‘cases like this are ‘rare’ – I’d say that’s based on bugger all rationale other than ‘the feminists scream loudest on Twitter and are designated ‘ victims’ under the rules of political correctness therefore their outrageous assertions like ‘half of all racistgo free’ must be right’. This case should open the door for re-examination of the entire process around crimes like rape. As with any other area of society the justice system has to exorcise ‘woke’ beliefs. A tall order and will probably need 50% of judges and lawyers disbarred at a minimum (they can start with ‘Soapy Joe’ and Charlotte Proudman) but in the words of Michael Biehn ‘it’s the only way to be sure’