The Criminal Cases Review Commission—Hope for the Innocent?

This book, now in paperback, focuses on the world's first publicly-funded body to review alleged miscarriages of justice, set up in the wake of notorious cases such as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. Bringing together critical perspectives from campaigners, prominent criminal appeal practitioners and academic specialists, it centres on the different aspects of the CCRC's tasks, in particular, the limitations placed on it by its governing statute that hinder its claimed independence from the appeal courts and its working practices which prevents the referral of cases in which victims may be factually innocent. The book compares the CCRC with existing systems in Scotland, the US and Canada that deal with alleged wrongful convictions. Thoroughly undermining its operations, this study argues that the CCRC's help to innocent victims of wrongful conviction is merely incidental.

MICHAEL NAUGHTON is Senior Lecturer, School of Law and Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, UK, and founder and Chair of the Innocence Network UK (INUK) and the University of Bristol Innocence Project (UoBIP). He has written widely on miscarriages of justice and the wrongful conviction of the innocent. He is the author of Rethinking Miscarriages of Justice: Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg.