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CCRC
Criminal + Cases « Review» Commission
From the Chair: Richard Foster CBE
The Rt Hon James Arbuthnot MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA Your ref:
Our ref: RF/JC
9 March 2015
Dear James
Thank you for your letter of 5 March.
Anyone who has been convicted by the courts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland
can appeal to this Commission against their conviction or sentence. Normally we
cannot consider an application unless the applicant has exhausted their other avenues
of appeal to the criminal courts. However, even where they have not done so we can
consider applications in, “exceptional circumstances”. “Exceptional circumstances”
include, but are most certainly not limited to, conviction by those who have pleaded
guilty in the magistrates courts as there is no route to have such convictions overturned
other than by way of appeal to this Commission; and applications by those who believe
there is no possibility of having their application overturned other than by an
investigation by this Commission using its statutory powers. An example of this latter
would be an application from someone who believed that important information was
withheld from them during the course of their prosecution which they cannot obtain by
themselves but can only be obtained by this Commission exercising its statutory
powers.
There is no charge to apply to the Commission or for the use of the Commission's
services. If an applicant is legally represented then we would, encourage the applicant
to come via their legal representative. But there is no requirement for this to happen
and in fact the majority of those applying to us are not legally represented. I enclose
with this letter a number of our "Easy Read” forms. As you can see, these are
designed to make the process of applying to us as straightforward as possible.
The Commission deals exclusively with criminal cases and has no role in civil
proceedings. Nevertheless, if you or your colleague MPs have information about
separate or parallel civil cases it would be helpful to have as much detail as you can
supply on these as there is often an important read-across between civil and criminal
proceedings. For example, information disclosed in civil proceedings can be of
considerable relevance in criminal trials.
The Commission is an investigative body with considerable investigate powers. We
can require any public body to preserve ‘and make available to us any material which
they hold and which we think may be relevant to our enquiries. Around half of our staff
are lawyers while others have backgrounds as former police officers, experts in
Birmingham Bg 2PW, DX 715466 Birmingham: 41
H www.ccrc.gov.uk
S in England, Wales and Northern ireland
The independent public body which investigates possible miscarriages of just
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science and so on. The same is true of our Commissioners. Should we judge it
necessary we can instruct the police to conduct an investigation on our behalf and
under our supervision.
If the Commission decides to refer a case back to the courts then the courts must
reconsider it. The test we apply in deciding whether to refer a case is known as the,
“real possibility” test as set out in the Criminal Appeals Act 1995. In lay terms, we
would expect to refer a case if we discover new evidence or argument not available at
trial which — in our judgment — had it been available at the time might well have led the
jury or the court not to convict. The most common form this takes is failure by those
responsible for bringing the prosecution to disclose to the defence information in the
prosecution team’s possession which had it been disclosed might have assisted the
defence.
A plea of guilty at trial is not a bar to applying to us or to the case being reconsidered
by the courts. On the contrary we have referred a number of cases recently where
defendants had been wrongly advised to plead guilty and where, as a result of our
referrals, the guilty plea has been set aside and convictions have been quashed.
Obviously we cannot reach a view on cases until we have had the opportunity to
investigate them so I can offer no view on the particular cases you described to me.
The Commission receives around 1500 applications yearly but only a very small
percentage of these — around 20 or 30 a year — result in our deciding to refer the matter
back to the courts. However, most of those cases that we refer back to the courts do
result in the conviction being quashed.
Although we are under very considerable resource pressure at present, in the event
that we do receive a number of applications, I intend to ask Sally Berlin our Director of
Casework Operations to set up a dedicated unit to handle these.
1am sending a copy of this letter to your colleague, Kevan Jones. Please feel free to
bring it to the attention of any other MP who you think should see it.
I hope this is helpful.
Yours sincerely
GRO.
Richard Foster
Chair
c.c. Kevan Jones MP