The Justice Gap

A Pretty Poor Defence

  ANALYSIS: High profile miscarriage cases attract publicity because of corrupt police or dishonest or incompetent experts, writes Maslen Merchant; however, compare those relatively few cases with the number of cases which become miscarriages because of poor defence work. This is happening in every court every day to some degree. As the criminal legal aid budget is tightened it will only get worse. Conscientious, ethical, altruistic lawyers are now few and far between and the number of miscarriage cases rises proportionately.

Today’s criminal lawyer is a businessman first and foremost – practising law seems to be sandwiched somewhere in between accountancy, practice management and marketing.

Access to justice for a defendant in criminal proceedings is entirely dependent on the trial process being fair. This extends not only to the judiciary and the prosecuting authorities but also the defence lawyers. In my view, there are far too many defence lawyers who fail in their duty to their clients at very basic levels and who, therefore, undermine the fairness of the proceedings as a whole.

This is an extract from Wrongly Accused? Who is responsible for investigating miscarriages of justices due out later this month as part of the Justice Gap series. The whole article is here.

PHOTO: The ‘March for Justice’ on October 16th which highlighted the cases of Kevin Lane and John Twomey – you can read about it here. Kevin Lane was jailed for life for in 1996 for the murder of Robert Magill. You can find out more at www.justiceforkevinlane.com. Maslen is acting for Kevin Lane. Police are presently investigating the new material- see the Guardian. ‘We should have a substantive response to our grounds of appeal in about two weeks time,’ Maslen says; adding that there should be a hearing at the court of appeal some time in December.