Hannah Quirk

The Significance of culture in criminal procedure reform: Why the revised disclosure scheme cannot work

Disclosure of unused material is essential to a fair trial, and nondisclosure has been a potent cause of miscarriages of justice. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, however, recent legislation addressing this issue has prioritised the alleged problems that disclosure causes to the prosecution, rather than its demonstrable importance as a safeguard against wrongful convictions. Despite amendment by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, it is argued that the controversial disclosure provisions of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 cannot be made to work. This is a consequence of three fundamental defects in the statutory scheme: lack of consideration of the working cultures and practices of the key protagonists; the resulting inappropriate allocation of responsibilities; and insufficient recognition of the limited sanctions for disclosure failures that can be imposed fairly upon defendants under the current system. It has long been recognised that the effectiveness of due process reforms may be limited by police culture and the inadequate delivery of defence legal services. Drawing on new empirical data, this article suggests that it is equally important to consider the interplay between crime control legislation and occupational cultures. Legislative changes may otherwise reinforce poor practice and provoke injustice.

Don't Mention the War: The Court of Appeal, the Criminal Cases Review Commission and Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland

Despite the vast transitional justice scholarship relating to prisoner release, amnesties and prosecutions when conflicts end, there is a significant gap in practice and academic literature regarding wrongful convictions. Uniquely amongst post‐conflict societies, Northern Ireland has a body for investigating miscarriages of justice, albeit one designed for ‘ordinary’ appeals. In the absence of a formal truth‐recovery process, criminal appeals are becoming a proxy for addressing the role of the state during ‘The Troubles,’ as well as remedying individual injustices. This article examines the approach of the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal during the conflict. It charts the developments in its decision‐making following the cease‐fires and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It concludes that the current system is unsatisfactory as it ignores the effects of the conflict on the appeal process and offers no insights into the role of the Court during the conflict. Alternative models are suggested.

Criminalising Contagion: Legal and Ethical Challenges of Disease Transmission and the Criminal Law.

This report summarises the papers given at the 4 seminars funded by the ESRC. The report also highlights other outputs of the project.

Improving healthcare through the use of ‘medical manslaughter’? Facts, fears and the future:

The criminal law looks set to play a larger role in regulating healthcare. Until recently, health professionals only faced the prospect of criminal liability if it could be proved that their gross negligence resulted in the death of a patient. In such a case, the professional could face a charge of gross negligence manslaughter (GNM). Prosecutions for ‘medical manslaughter’ have generated concern among doctors worried about what is perceived as a rise in the number of doctors facing criminal prosecution and the impact prosecutions are having on healthcare practice. May more frequent resort to the criminal process damage rather than promote better health care? In seeking to try to answer this question, the first problem is that reliable data in this area about how many prosecutions are brought and how they fare are limited due to the way cases are recorded. What evidence does exist is often based on media reports or samples that are not representative. This paper will argue that, while the real risk of being prosecuted for medical manslaughter remains low, such fears should not be dismissed because, as Donald Berwick has argued, ‘fear is toxic’ – for health professionals and their patients.

Criminalising contagion: the criminal law and disease transmission.

I am pleased to introduce this part of the first collaboration between BMJ journals Medical Humanities , Sexually Transmitted Infections i and Journal of Medical Ethics ii on the important theme of the criminalisation of disease transmission. I am grateful first to Debbie Kirklin, and then to Sue Eckstein for their guidance as editors. As well as bringing together scholarship for the diverse readership of these publications, these papers represent the first output of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded seminar series, Criminalising Contagion: Legal and Ethical Challenges of Disease Transmission and the Criminal Law, 1 undertaken with my colleagues, Catherine Stanton and David Gurnham. This venture is the offspring of several projects stemming from the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy at the University of Manchester that have explored the developing intersection of healthcare and the criminal law.2 It is proving a fascinating area in which to work. We have a range of panellists with interdisciplinary and international expertise, including lawyers, public health practitioners, charity organisations and academics, many of whom will be familiar to readers of these journals and who have contributed to this BMJ collection. Public health concerns, from sexually transmitted diseases to swine …

Review: Criminal Discovery: From Truth to Proof and Back AgainMoisidisCosmasCRIMINAL DISCOVERY: FROM TRUTH TO PROOF AND BACK AGAINFederation Press; Sydney Institute of Criminology Series (Sydney, 2008), 287 pp, ISBN-13: 9780975196779 (pbk), £32.50

Criminal discovery—the gathering and pre-trial exchange of material—is ‘arguably the most important component of the pre-trial process’ (p. 1). The state has vastly superior investigatory resources at its disposal compared to the defendant, and its duty to share material developed partly in response to miscarriages of justice linked to significant failings in this regard. Conversely, measures such as requiring advance notice of alibi defences and curtailing the right of silence have been introduced to prevent defendants from ‘ambushing’ the prosecution at trial. In this volume, Cosmas Moisidis argues that the often polarised positions struck around these countervailing duties of disclosure correspond to whether the trial is regarded as a forum for establishing truth or proof. The author charts the piecemeal evolution of discovery, exploring how the prevailing view has swung between the two positions, and compares discovery schemes in Australia, England and the USA with the goal of informing current debate and future policy.

Regulation and Criminal Justice: Regulation and criminal justice: exploring the connections and disconnections

This book explores the relationship between regulation and criminal justice. It comprises a selection of papers presented to an international seminar series hosted by the School of Law, University of Manchester, UK, between November 2007 and February 2009.1 The majority of seminar participants were criminologists and interdisciplinary scholars involved in research across a range of criminal justice fields, invited to engage in a ‘long conversation’ with several regulation scholars and practitioners. One of the strengths of interdisciplinary discourse is the crossfertilization of ideas between specialisms that facilitates comparative study and knowledge transfer. Socio-legal research and analysis, in explanatory and normative forms, has played a crucial part in the recent development of regulation (Morgan and Yeung 2007) and criminal justice (Sanders et al. 2010) as distinct areas of scholarship. But, as we will see, the two areas do share some common heritage, and so it is not surprising that connections have been established – most persuasively in the fields of policing (Ayling et al. 2009; Johnston and Shearing 2003) and restorative justice as an alternative to penal orthodoxy (Braithwaite 2002). Grabosky (see Chapter 4, this book) describes regulation as a ‘mansion with many rooms’, an image that captures its scope, multifaceted character and conceptual diversity. Contemporary regulation discourse is rooted in public sector innovation dating back some three decades, which led to the transformation of governance in, and between, democratic polities regionally and globally (Levi-Faur 2005; Majone 1996). Keeping abreast