Criminal Justice Crisis

In recent years the English criminal justice system has been shaken to its foundations by an unprecedented series of miscarriages of justice. The Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, the Birmingham Six, Judith Ward and Stefan Kiszko are among the most prominent of those eventually cleared of serious crimes after many years in prison. While the sheer numbers of cases involved are troubling, it is the underlying causes of wrongful conviction which threw the system's credibility into question and led to the establishment of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice chaired by Lord Runciman. In Criminal Justice in Crisis an internationally distinguished group of leading academics, practitioners and campaigners…