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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Presumed Guilty
Mike Mansfield
Mandarin £5.99
It was possible 30 years ago to hear people saying, ‘British justice is the best in the world’ – not a claim heard much nowadays. Even so, miscarriages of justice are still believed to be exceptional. Mike Mansfield shows in Presumed Guilty that they can happen to anyone.
He describes in detail a case which could have resulted in a young Asian man being given a life sentence for something he did not do. His solicitor believed in his innocence sufficiently to take on the initial legal expenses himself and was experienced enough not to allow the police and Crown Prosecution Service to hinder his investigations. However, by the time the jury had cleared him, this young man had spent 15 months banged up in a remand centre 200 miles from his family.
Mike Mansfield uses this case to illustrate the weaknesses of the British legal system, one of which is that police carry out investigations of a crime. This, he says, leads to their deciding the guilty person is the one they have arrested and making their evidence fit their case. He says that police are likely to be believed in court, despite having been known to falsify confessions, terrorise, torture, discourage suspects from calling a solicitor and hinder the defendant’s solicitor from investigating the case.
Defence solicitors face further difficulties: some of the evidence in the hands of the prosecution may never be released to them, even if it would prove the client’s innocence, and legal aid is inadequate, difficult to get and due for further cuts.
Mansfield compares the British legal system unfavourably with the French and American. Judges are almost exclusively from a public school, Oxbridge background in Britain, whereas he would like to see them drawn from all walks of life as they are in France. He thinks magistrates’ courts should be abolished. Magistrates are ‘virtually untrained ... predominantly affluent, conservative and middle class’.
He would also like to see improvements in the system of bail, remand and forensic science. Yet he does not explain why there are still innocent men on death row in America, or racist murders by French police. Although he points out that 17-year-old Katherine Griffiths spent considerably longer in a closed prison for stealing a bottle of milk than Ernest Saunders for the Guinness fraud, he does not conclude that injustice arises out of the class system.
The chapters dealing with the murder case were alternated with chapters discussing details of other cases, legal systems or proposals for reform. This meant that, fascinating as the story was, it was constantly interrupted and I found this distracting and confusing. Despite this, since the book is full of useful information, exposing the brutality, incompetence and arrogance of those who administer the legal system, it is well worth reading.
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