Speaker 1: This isn't the story of one legal case. It's about
Speaker 1: what happens if the system itself makes mistakes. In Britain,
Speaker 1: a guilty verdict carries enormous weight. It's meant to be final,
Speaker 1: but history tells us it's not always final. What if
Speaker 1: the system gets it wrong? For the people trapped inside
Speaker 1: that verdict, the road back can be painfully slow, sometimes impossible.
Speaker 1: In this episode, I'm looking beyond the headlines to the
Speaker 1: machinery of British justice, the appeal courts, the Criminal Cases
Speaker 1: Review Commission, which investigates cases where there are doubts, and
Speaker 1: the culture that makes it so hard to admit error.
Speaker 1: To help make sense of it, I spoke to John Robbins,
Speaker 1: a journalist who spent years reporting on miscarriages of justice
Speaker 1: in the UK. He's talked to families, lawyers, campaigners. He
Speaker 1: knows the process and the points where it breaks. I'm
Speaker 1: Amanda Knox and from Vespucci and iHeart Podcasts. This is
Speaker 1: Doubt the Case of Lucy let Be Bonus episode two,
Speaker 1: The Long Road to Justice for people who haven't witnessed
Speaker 1: or had experience of the British justice system. Let's start
Speaker 1: with what happens after a conviction and why the path
Speaker 1: to correcting a mistake feels so narrow.
Speaker 2: So if you are an innocent person wrongly convicted and
Speaker 2: you're going to city in prison and you're rotting in prison,
Speaker 2: basically your one chance of freedom, your one shot is
Speaker 2: to write an application to this Birmingham based organization called
Speaker 2: the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and if they think you've
Speaker 2: got a good case, they have the power to refer
Speaker 2: your case back to the Court of a and the
Speaker 2: Court of Appeal has the power to overturn it.
Speaker 3: And it's just for.
Speaker 2: American listeners, and for listeners outside of the UK it
Speaker 2: will seem a bit bonkers because actually one of the
Speaker 2: reasons why the Criminication Review Commission was set up in
Speaker 2: the first place was because of all these miscarriages, just
Speaker 2: as we saw in the seventies and the eighties, And
Speaker 2: really the idea was the courts just never got to scripts.
Speaker 3: With these difficult cases.
Speaker 2: So we'll introduce this brilliant mischaracter justice watchdog body. So
Speaker 2: the problem is the courts, then that is a difficulty.
Speaker 1: In the US, I've seen the same pattern. Once you're convicted,
Speaker 1: the machinery of justice isn't built to look backward. Appeal
Speaker 1: courts don't ask did we get the truth? They ask
Speaker 1: did we follow the rules? Across this episode, I'm asking
Speaker 1: John to break down the structure, how appeals work, the culture,
Speaker 1: why institutions resist changing their minds, and the human cost
Speaker 1: what this does to people and families. You're going to
Speaker 1: hear a few phrases that matter. One is fresh evidence,
Speaker 1: another is an atomistic approach. Together they shape what gets
Speaker 1: back before judges and what doesn't. Let's start with the
Speaker 1: nuts and bolts. If someone is convicted and says the
Speaker 1: court got it wrong, the presumption of innocence then flips.
Speaker 1: In other words, the system treats the conviction as fact,
Speaker 1: and it's up to the convicted person to prove a
Speaker 1: miscarriage of justice. But how do you prove a negative?
Speaker 2: Well, you can have all the supports and public will
Speaker 2: and media coverage that you want. Whether you're going to
Speaker 2: hit the legal thresholds is a totally different matter. But yes,
Speaker 2: proving a negative absolutely what a nightmare, especially in this scenario,
Speaker 2: the legalistic nature of our court. You need fresh evidence.
Speaker 2: That fresh evidence must be enough to undermine the safety
Speaker 2: of the conviction and the history of miscarriage just as
Speaker 2: recently is the courts can take a very narrow view
Speaker 2: on that. Legal scholars will kind of talk about anatomistic
Speaker 2: approach where they just look narrowly at what is before them,
Speaker 2: the new evidence that's before them, and they don't look
Speaker 2: at everything else that everyone else might.
Speaker 3: Be talking about.
Speaker 1: In theory, that sounds reasonable. You get a fair trial,
Speaker 1: and if something goes wrong, you can appeal. In practice,
Speaker 1: that appeal is incredibly hard to win. Appeal courts don't
Speaker 1: retry cases. They only look for mistakes in law or
Speaker 1: procedure and for new evidence that wasn't available the first
Speaker 1: time around. In the US, applic courts are just as reluctant.
Speaker 1: The Innocence Project has shown that most successful exonerations come
Speaker 1: from new DNA evidence. That's because it it's almost the
Speaker 1: only kind of proof they'll accept. Anything else, even confessions
Speaker 1: from real perpetrators, can be dismissed as not new enough.
Speaker 1: Judging whether evidence is new enough is the responsibility of
Speaker 1: the Criminal Case's Review Commission the CCRC. It's the body
Speaker 1: that decides whether a case is strong enough to send
Speaker 1: back to the Court of appeal. It's supposed to be
Speaker 1: the safety net, but as John explains, it's a net
Speaker 1: with large holes.
Speaker 3: To kind of further layer on complexities.
Speaker 2: You only will get your case sent back to the
Speaker 2: Court of Appeal if the Criminal Case Review Commission believes
Speaker 2: you have the reasonable possibility of your conviction being overturned,
Speaker 2: which means the CCRC, the watchtock body, has to second
Speaker 2: guess the Court of appeal. The real problem here is
Speaker 2: if you get a more conservative court of appeal, then
Speaker 2: increasingly the CCRC becomes a more conservative body, and that's
Speaker 2: what we've seen over the last years. The CCRC has
Speaker 2: pretty much ground to a halt.
Speaker 1: It means the CCRC can't simply act on doubt. They
Speaker 1: have to predict how the same court that upheld the
Speaker 1: original verdict is likely to respond a second time, and
Speaker 1: so the case is most in need of review. The
Speaker 1: complex contested ones often never get that chance. But how
Speaker 1: did this justice watchdog end up with this built in restraint?
Speaker 2: The CCRC was set up after a series of this charriacters.
Speaker 2: Just as the most kind of famous one was a
Speaker 2: Birmingham six, so six kind of Innocent's irish been wrongly
Speaker 2: convicted an IRA bombing campaign in the nineteen seventies and
Speaker 2: there were a run of these cases, the Birmingham six,
Speaker 2: the Guildford four and Maguire seven, known as the r
Speaker 2: Irish cases, and then there were other cases as well,
Speaker 2: and the system lost public confidence to such a degree
Speaker 2: that there was a Royal Commission and the main recommendation
Speaker 2: was to set up the CCRC. CCRC came into being
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety seven. Miscaracters of Justice has kind of
Speaker 2: moved as an issue that politicians kind of cut their
Speaker 2: teeth on and made their careers through in the seventies
Speaker 2: and the eighties and felt very strongly about and an
Speaker 2: issue that really motivated the public. But for some reason,
Speaker 2: and I'm not quite sure why this reason would be,
Speaker 2: the politicians moved on, the media moved on as well.
Speaker 2: The CCRC has been The problems are complex. It's been
Speaker 2: staved of funds for years, you know, for over a decade.
Speaker 2: It's been kind of newted by the courts making criticism
Speaker 2: the Commission, and it's been let down by its own
Speaker 2: leadership as well, and there's lots of concerns about the
Speaker 2: way the organization has handled itself. But I think the
Speaker 2: serious issue is it's been undermined, underfunded, But it's also
Speaker 2: seemingly run by people who haven't really kind of grasped
Speaker 2: the challenge of the Commission, who aren't prepared to fight
Speaker 2: against injustice, who are prepared to kind of expose these cases,
Speaker 2: and it's become this defanged watchdog.
Speaker 1: Some argue that the very organization created to stop injustice
Speaker 1: now hesitates to challenge it. Even strong cases can stall
Speaker 1: because they don't fit the narrow definition of fresh evidence.
Speaker 2: They don't look at the new narrative. They just look
Speaker 2: at that new piece of fresh evidence, and if that's
Speaker 2: not enough to undermine the conviction, then the conviction remains
Speaker 2: in place. We've seen, you know, frankly, very odd examples.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've written about cases where the whole prosecution
Speaker 2: case has been entirely I would argue undermine, and yet
Speaker 2: a conviction has been upheld on the most narrowest reason.
Speaker 2: And what you get is the Court of Appeal clinging
Speaker 2: on to the fiction of a man's guilt and the
Speaker 2: rest of the world has moved on and said he
Speaker 2: was innocent. From this atomistic approach, is this new piece
Speaker 2: of evidence enough to undermine the conviction?
Speaker 3: No, it's not.
Speaker 2: The conviction stays. We're not going to listen to all
Speaker 2: that stuff that you're talking about in the media that
Speaker 2: you're excited about. We're going to take this narrow, atimistic approach.
Speaker 1: This narrow view of fresh evidence invites a paradox of finality,
Speaker 1: the idea that stability matters more than truth. Once a
Speaker 1: verdict is entered, the legal machine resists ondoing it no
Speaker 1: matter how shaky the foundation, and when the Commission does
Speaker 1: refer a case, the Court of Appeal can still reject it,
Speaker 1: sometimes on the same grounds that the CCRC to hesitate
Speaker 1: in the first place. This means that very few people
Speaker 1: actually succeed in overturning their convictions.
Speaker 2: Fifteen hundred people apply to the CCRC asking for their
Speaker 2: case to be looked at again. A few years ago,
Speaker 2: just twelve people got their case sent back to the
Speaker 2: Court of Appeal, and then a couple of years after that,
Speaker 2: just thirteen to less than one percent get their cases
Speaker 2: sent back, And then, of course the Court of Appeal
Speaker 2: doesn't overturn every one of them. The success rate of
Speaker 2: the CCRC is about seventy percent.
Speaker 1: In this system, certainty is prized above correction. It protects
Speaker 1: the idea that the courts are almost always right, and
Speaker 1: for the few who are wronged, the path to proving
Speaker 1: it is long, lonely and stacked against them. That's something
Speaker 1: I recognize deeply. There's a special kind of isolation that
Speaker 1: comes from knowing you're right but having no one in
Speaker 1: power willing to believe you. But it isn't just the
Speaker 1: structure that makes justice so hard to reach, it's also
Speaker 1: the mindset. Next, John explains why British justice struggles not
Speaker 1: just with procedure but with pride. Journalist and justice expert
Speaker 1: John Robbins says the biggest obstacle to overturning wrongful convictions
Speaker 1: in Britain isn't always the law itself, it's the people
Speaker 1: enforcing it and the deep instinct within the system to
Speaker 1: defend itself.
Speaker 2: So if we kind of go back to the bad
Speaker 2: old days when there were these miscastus of justice in
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, that the main one
Speaker 2: being the Birmingham's case, the judge that every law student
Speaker 2: would know, Lord Denning, and the most well known judge
Speaker 2: in our lifetime, said He've got a very famous quote,
Speaker 2: but he said, if these men were telling the truth.
Speaker 2: In other words, if these six innocent Irish men were
Speaker 2: telling the truth and they were not IRA bombers, it
Speaker 2: would be such the quote is such an appalling vista,
Speaker 2: such an appalling prospect, because it meant that the police
Speaker 2: would be lying, that the police would have beaten these
Speaker 2: people up, etc. The police did lie, they did beat
Speaker 2: confessions out of them, and they were convicted on dodgy evidence.
Speaker 2: Denning's point was it's better that these people are convicted
Speaker 2: and stay in prison then they're let out, because if
Speaker 2: they're let out, that will undermine the integrity.
Speaker 3: And the justice system.
Speaker 1: Once a jury's verdict is in, every other part of
Speaker 1: the process tends to reinforce it. Appeal judges defer to
Speaker 1: trial judges, the CCRC defers to the Court of Appeal,
Speaker 1: and at the end of that chain, the convicted person
Speaker 1: is left shouting into the wind. The presumption of guilt
Speaker 1: after conviction could describe almost any justice system I've encountered.
Speaker 1: Once you're labeled guilty, the system assumes there was a
Speaker 1: good reason for the conviction, and so the burden of
Speaker 1: proof shifts. This assumption can be traced back to the
Speaker 1: initial trial, which is fought in an adversarial system.
Speaker 2: The avasial system is this competitive theatrical one side, two
Speaker 2: different narratives competing in the minds of the jewelry, and
Speaker 2: that can easily, as you can imagine, distort a version
Speaker 2: of events. And when you get the conviction happens. Then
Speaker 2: suddenly the prosecution narrative becomes the dominant narrative which the
Speaker 2: media report on. So any kind of nuance, any kind
Speaker 2: of inaccuracies, are sealed forever in the trial.
Speaker 1: In other words, the system prizes finality not because it's efficient,
Speaker 1: but because it protects authority and the closure that a
Speaker 1: verdict offers the victims and their families. It keeps the
Speaker 1: story neat someone did it case closed, but protecting that
Speaker 1: finality comes at the cost of the truth. You may
Speaker 1: have heard the term quality control used in business and manufacturing.
Speaker 1: Car companies, app developers, online marketplaces. They all employ regular
Speaker 1: QC measures to ensure customer satisfaction and safety. The assembly
Speaker 1: line should be checked at some regular interval to ensure
Speaker 1: there aren't defects that might cause harm. The presumption in
Speaker 1: such cases is that there are inevitably errors, hopefully few,
Speaker 1: but they won't be corrected unless you go looking for them.
Speaker 1: That is why in the US conviction integrity units exist,
Speaker 1: but they are often and small, underfunded, and politically risky.
Speaker 1: It's hard to tell your own colleagues that they ruined
Speaker 1: someone's life, even when the evidence demands it.
Speaker 2: It's a political problem. It's a complicated problem, is what
Speaker 2: it is. It's a cultural problem as well. It's a
Speaker 2: multi dimensional problem. Yes, it is political. It's successive governments
Speaker 2: have failed to recognize the importance of what is an
Speaker 2: absolutely essential safety net.
Speaker 3: Path of the justice system. That's a political problem.
Speaker 2: It's being underfunded, but also the wrong people are being
Speaker 2: put in to kind of lead the Commission. You can
Speaker 2: always find ways not to overturn convictions, you can always
Speaker 2: find ways to keep it as some people in prison,
Speaker 2: because the cases are never particularly black and white, they're
Speaker 2: always kind of gray areas, and if you're kind of
Speaker 2: looking for a reason not to do anything, you'll find
Speaker 2: that reason. And that's one of the things that's gone
Speaker 2: wrong with the Commission.
Speaker 1: And that's where John's own reporting often begins, in the
Speaker 1: gap between what the law says is possible and what
Speaker 1: fairness demands. He talks about visiting families who've spent decades
Speaker 1: fighting to prove a loved one's innocence. By then, the
Speaker 1: battle isn't just legal, it's psychological.
Speaker 3: It's devastating.
Speaker 2: There are thousands of people whose loved ones are in prison,
Speaker 2: who have applied to the commission, and they're just going nowhere,
Speaker 2: and it's heartbreaking. These people are just stuck in this
Speaker 2: kind of limbo period.
Speaker 1: But outside that system, beyond the courts and commissions, there's
Speaker 1: another force that can change how these stories are told,
Speaker 1: the public and the media. Behind every legal case, there's
Speaker 1: a person and usually a family, living with the fallout
Speaker 1: for them. A wrongful conviction isn't an abstract problem in
Speaker 1: the justice system. It's a sentence that an end when
Speaker 1: the prison doors open. Even exoneration can feel hollow. The
Speaker 1: public rarely hears that part of the story, how difficult
Speaker 1: it is to rebuild, or how reluctant the state is
Speaker 1: to make amends. In the US, exoneries face that too.
Speaker 1: There's no automatic compensation in most states. You often have
Speaker 1: to sue, which can be difficult, and even when compensation
Speaker 1: is available, it's often very limited. That's not to mention
Speaker 1: the reputational stain. For me even ten years after my exoneration,
Speaker 1: many people around the world continue to doubt my innocence,
Speaker 1: and in England exoneries have to prove their innocence to
Speaker 1: get payment. The overturning of their conviction is not enough.
Speaker 1: People have lost decades of their lives and then been
Speaker 1: left with nothing to help rebuild. There's a quiet cruelty
Speaker 1: in that logic. If the court's got it wrong, the
Speaker 1: least the system could do is help people start again. Instead,
Speaker 1: many are left to crowdfund their recovery while officials protect
Speaker 1: the myth that justice never falters. But sometimes those myths crack,
Speaker 1: not because the courts reopen a case, but because the
Speaker 1: public takes an interest.
Speaker 2: The media can be, you know, kind of the wrongly convicted.
Speaker 2: It is the lifeline. You know that there is no
Speaker 2: kind of wrongful toleration that I know of that hasn't
Speaker 2: involved at an engage media pushing at the doors of
Speaker 2: the courts.
Speaker 3: But the problem is the media is, for.
Speaker 2: Some reasons to become increasingly disengaged, and we've definitely suffered from
Speaker 2: that on this side of the Atlantic. I don't know
Speaker 2: if that's true for you, but that's our experience. You
Speaker 2: just need the attention of the media, the relentless of
Speaker 2: the press, to make any kind of change. The irony ears,
Speaker 2: the CCRC, the Case of Review Commission, the Prescriture Justice
Speaker 2: watchdog will say, we will not respond to media campaigns.
Speaker 2: Quite right, you know, just because someone is sympathetic to
Speaker 2: the media, why should their case be treated any differently.
Speaker 2: But you absolutely do need the engagements of the media
Speaker 2: to make any difference here, really do.
Speaker 1: On the flip side, the headlines that helped convict someone
Speaker 1: can make exoneration almost impossible. Once a story becomes a
Speaker 1: national obsession, it's hard for new evidence to compete with
Speaker 1: what people think they already know. I dealt with this firsthand.
Speaker 1: Once a narrative like the Angel Faced Killer takes hold,
Speaker 1: changing that story is like trying to stop an avalanche
Speaker 1: halfway down the mountain.
Speaker 2: There will have been journalists who sat through the Lucy
Speaker 2: let Be trial. There are journalists who sat through trials
Speaker 2: that I've written about quite recently. And what happens is
Speaker 2: when someone is convicted, that becomes the truth, that becomes
Speaker 2: the biblical truth, the only narrative. And in an adversarial
Speaker 2: justice system, as I described, where you get a prosecution
Speaker 2: narrative versus a defense narrative, and you don't get that
Speaker 2: kind of commitment to pursuing the truth necessarily. It's very
Speaker 2: very dangerous. It does worry me that the media is
Speaker 2: uncritical when it sits through the trials or else there
Speaker 2: is a responsibility, isn't there to the media to pick
Speaker 2: up afterwards? But what we saw with the Lucy let
Speaker 2: Be conviction, it seems to me, was a very fixed
Speaker 2: narrative and that's very very hard to shift. It is shifting,
Speaker 2: i think, but it's very hard to shift.
Speaker 1: When the public pays attention, things can shift. In Britain.
Speaker 1: That happened with the post Office scandal, a massive miscarriage
Speaker 1: of justice that saw hundreds of postal workers wrongly convicted
Speaker 1: after a computer system falsely accused them of theft. It
Speaker 1: took years of reporting, proto test and public anger to
Speaker 1: put it right. Stories like that remind us that justice
Speaker 1: doesn't always start in courtrooms. It often begins with ordinary
Speaker 1: people who refuse to be silent. But what would it
Speaker 1: take to make those stories less rare and the system
Speaker 1: less defensive? If there's a thread running through every story
Speaker 1: of wrongful conviction, it's resistance, the system's resistance to being
Speaker 1: wrong and people's resistance to giving up. There is hope
Speaker 1: for reform, but only if that resistance shifts from defending
Speaker 1: the system to defending the truth, and that includes the media.
Speaker 2: Well, I think journalists have got to find their own
Speaker 2: position on it. But I do think they need to
Speaker 2: be more open minded about cases being miscarriages of justice
Speaker 2: and more critical thinking the idea that journalists sat through
Speaker 2: this trial and they were there and if she is innocent,
Speaker 2: then it does raise questions about kind of challenging these
Speaker 2: narratives that we talked about. I think the let Be
Speaker 2: case is really interesting because it kind of potentially shows
Speaker 2: the worst and best of journalism. Juralisa there in a
Speaker 2: formal sense to deliver open justice and make sure that
Speaker 2: justice is done. They're there in court, you know, they're
Speaker 2: thereby proxy to represent the people. That's one of the
Speaker 2: ideas that we have in the UK, This notion, the
Speaker 2: firm sense of open justice, hugely challenged by the massive
Speaker 2: decrease of interest on the palf of the media.
Speaker 3: For these cases. I mean, one of the issues that
Speaker 3: we have is.
Speaker 2: That media organization's newspapers, broadcasters just don't have the money
Speaker 2: to have people sitting in court these days.
Speaker 1: In England, a right to appeal sounds like a simple idea,
Speaker 1: but it would mean a fundamental change in mindset. Instead
Speaker 1: of treating appeals as rare exceptions, they become a part
Speaker 1: of how the system keeps itself up. Honest, not every
Speaker 1: system has this fault. In Italy, for instance, appeals are guaranteed.
Speaker 1: It's one of the few things about my experience with
Speaker 1: their justice system that was better than it would have
Speaker 1: been in England or the US. In the US, there's
Speaker 1: technically a right to appeal, but it's limited, especially after
Speaker 1: the first round. Habeas corpus petitions are supposed to be
Speaker 1: a safeguard, but they're narrow and procedural. Once you're convicted.
Speaker 1: The law values closure over correction. That's what England and
Speaker 1: America share. But John says he sees signs of change,
Speaker 1: particularly in the case of Lucy let Be.
Speaker 2: It kind of feels that the media is really re
Speaker 2: engaging in a way that it hasn't done since the
Speaker 2: bad old days of those terrible cases like the Birmingham
Speaker 2: six and the Guildford four. People are outraged and of
Speaker 2: course they get attacked by the legal establishment, and it's
Speaker 2: been very interesting to see the legal establishments or representatives
Speaker 2: the legal establishments speaking out about their concerns as well
Speaker 2: up which I think is kind of unprecedented. Former Supreme
Speaker 2: Court judge has spoken out about concerns about the let
Speaker 2: Be case. We've had conservative former government ministers talking out
Speaker 2: about it as well. That comes from that engaged media
Speaker 2: that I was describing before. You know it creates that
Speaker 2: support for the campaign.
Speaker 1: There's a humility in that the idea that justice isn't
Speaker 1: perfect and doesn't need to be. It just needs to
Speaker 1: be honest enough to correct itself. John says he's learned
Speaker 1: something over years of reporting these cases that justice isn't
Speaker 1: only about courts and commissions. It's about the collective will
Speaker 1: to keep asking questions.
Speaker 2: What we kind of need, I think in our day
Speaker 2: and age is a justice system that has a bit
Speaker 2: more humility. I think we can all take it. The
Speaker 2: idea that mistakes are made, that they are recognized, and
Speaker 2: they're done efficiently and swiftly. I think that's what people
Speaker 2: would expect from the justice system.
Speaker 1: We're going to take a short break for now, but
Speaker 1: it's for a good reason. I'm actually in the UK.
Speaker 1: I've been meeting with people directly connected to the case
Speaker 1: and having some incredible conversations that I can't wait to
Speaker 1: share with you. So stay with us for the next
Speaker 1: episodes of Doubt the Case of Lucy Letpie. Doubt the
Speaker 1: Case of Lucy let Bee is brought to you by Vespucci,
Speaker 1: iHeart Podcasts and Knox Robinson Productions. I've been your host
Speaker 1: Amanda Knox. This episode was written by Joe Meek. The
Speaker 1: co producer was Lucy Ditchmond. The assistant producer was Amy Gill.
Speaker 1: Senior producer is Natalia Rodriguez. The sound designer is Tom Biddle.
Speaker 1: The theme music was written by Tom Biddle. Story editing
Speaker 1: by Kathleen Goldhar. Legal advice was provided by Jack Browning.
Speaker 1: The producers at iHeart Podcasts are Chandler Mays and Katrina Norville.
Speaker 1: The executive producers were Joe Meek, Amanda Knox, Christopher Robinson,
Speaker 1: Daniel Turkin, and Johnny Galvin. Thank you for listening.