All Souls Blog: Book Launch: 'Reasons to Doubt: Wrongful Convictions and the Criminal Cases Review Commission'
Carolyn Hoyle is Professor of Criminology at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, and was its Director from 2012 - 2017. Her research interests include domestic violence, the death penalty, and wrongful convictions. In this year’s second All Souls Lecture, Professor Hoyle presented her and Dr Mai Sato’s book on their research conducted into applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which has been published by Oxford University Press in January 2019: Reasons to Doubt: Wrongful Convictions and the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The presentation was followed by a response by Dr Hannah Quirk who is a Reader in Criminology at King’s College London and former Case Review Manager (CRM) at the CCRC. She also worked with the Innocence Project in New Orleans.
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A recording of this talk is available here
The CCRC’s History: Restoring Public Confidence in the Criminal Justice System?
Professor Hoyle began her presentation by giving an overview of the history of the CCRC: A series of media-effective ‘catalytic’ wrongful convictions in the 1970s (particularly for terrorist Irish Republican Army bombings that, for example, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, the Birmingham Six, and Judith Ward had been convicted for) had led to a crisis of public confidence into the criminal justice system. As a consequence, a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice was set up to examine the effectiveness of the justice system. In its final report in 1993, the Commission recommended that the Home Secretary’s power to refer cases to the Court of Appeal (‘the Court’) should be removed and a new body should be set up to consider alleged miscarriages of justice. The CCRC was subsequently established by section 8 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 and began its work in 1997 in Birmingham. The Commission has been given a range of powers and resources with a staff of thirty to forty case workers, twelve commissioners, legal and investigations advisors, and administrative and executive support. However, its authority is limited in that it cannot quash convictions on its own but has the power to refer the convictions back to appeal. The establishment of the CCRC as an independent, state funded body with powers to investigate miscarriages of justice was pioneering and has inspired other jurisdictions to follow suit—Scotland, Norway, and the American state of North Carolina have set up similar commissions, while other jurisdictions are contemplating it.
The ‘Real Possibility Test’ and its Implications
Professor Hoyle then moved on to describe the benchmark against which the CCRC must orient its work, the ‘real possibility test’: According to Criminal Appeal Act 1995, section 13, ‘a reference
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