Miscarriages of justice when found not guilty

Nessie said:
Henry, the list includes the sentences imposed, that means they were found guilty. Unless you find a case where the accused is clearly found not guilty or the case is dropped either prior to or duing the trial, then assume it is not relevant to this thread please.
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They were found not guilty after being wrongfully arrested and convicted. That's relevant to this thread.
 
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Henri McPhee said:
They were found not guilty after being wrongfully arrested and convicted. That's relevant to this thread.
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They were originally found guilty at a trial. Convicted means they were found guilty at their trial. They then had that conviction overturned.

This thread is about people who were either found not guilty at their first trial or the case was dropped prior to going to trial. At no point have they been found guilty.

Please stop posting anything about anyone who has ever been found guilty at a trial
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-42745181

"An Oxford University student accused of rape has had the charges dropped after being on bail for two years.
Oliver Mears was arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault in July 2015 when he was 17 years old.
The chemistry scholar, now 19, was told prosecutors would offer no evidence against him, just days before the start of his trial on Monday.
Prosecutors said the decision to withdraw came after an evidence review, but was not due to a disclosure issue."

The CPS scum (no better word for those involved) wait till 2 DAYS before the trial and admit they have NO EVIDENCE!!!

Update

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/53775...ase-oliver-mears-collapse-new-evidence-diary/

"A NEWLY-discovered diary has cleared an Oxford University student of rape just days before he was due to stand trial after two years of torment.
Sarah Lindop, for the Crown Prosecution Service, said material had surfaced last week which she admitted was "late in the day" on what was already a"finely balanced case".

When asked what the delay in getting the evidence was, she explained there were "disclosure matters" in diary entries that cops had been trying to secure."
 
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Here is why there is such a problem;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42734185

Alison Saunders, head of prosecutions in England, thinks that the recent series of collapsed rape cases is a sign the system works!!!!!

"No-one is in jail after being wrongly convicted due to failures to disclose evidence, the UK's top prosecutor has said "as far as she can tell".
Alison Saunders' comments come after several rape trials collapsed when it emerged that vital evidence had not been shared with defence lawyers.
The Metropolitan Police has launched a review of 30 sex crime cases.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Ms Saunders said it actually showed the justice system was working.
She said that the collapsed trials demonstrate that "safeguards in place" in the trial process prevent wrongful imprisonment."

No, what that shows is how the police and prosecutors keep on failing to fully and properly investigate crimes and instead they fixate on a suspect so as to get a detection and a trial. They only look for evidence to convict and ignore exculpatory evidence.

Innocent people's lives are put on hold, often ruined and left with life long effects because the police and CPS do not understand that.
 
Nessie said:
<snip>

No, what that shows is how the police and prosecutors keep on failing to fully and properly investigate crimes and instead they fixate on a suspect so as to get a detection and a trial. They only look for evidence to convict and ignore exculpatory evidence.

Innocent people's lives are put on hold, often ruined and left with life long effects because the police and CPS do not understand that.
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I think they understand just fine. They are callous, not stupid. They just don't care.

A little 'collateral damage' is a price they are willing to pay. (Probably because it doesn't cost them anything. Which is the root of much of the problem.)
 
The fear, for rape in particular, is that the crap investigations will mean juries are less likely to convict because they are worried the police and prosecutor has hidden evidence or not bothered to properly check the evidence.
 
Nessie said:
The fear, for rape in particular, is that the crap investigations will mean juries are less likely to convict because they are worried the police and prosecutor has hidden evidence or not bothered to properly check the evidence.
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This is the other side of the problem, every such case where evidence is hidden or the alleged victim made false claims just makes things harder for genuine victims. There really have to be stiffer penalties for those who attempt to use the legal system to indulge their spite over some petty personal issue.
 
The idiot Alison Saunders, who runs the CPS said

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42734185

"that although police had to "pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry" it was not reasonable to expect them to explore "every single avenue" of what a person had ever done in their life."

You don't need to check everything! What an idiotic, childish comment.

Just ensure that the police ask the victim/accuser, show me what you have posted online, texted and written about the accused, in particular anything you said about the allegation of rape. Make sure the police check everything around the time of the allegation. Point out that if she fails to disclose anything or lies, then the case is likely to collapse and she could be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice.
 
Nessie said:
The idiot Alison Saunders, who runs the CPS said

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42734185

"that although police had to "pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry" it was not reasonable to expect them to explore "every single avenue" of what a person had ever done in their life."

You don't need to check everything! What an idiotic, childish comment.

Just ensure that the police ask the victim/accuser, show me what you have posted online, texted and written about the accused, in particular anything you said about the allegation of rape. Make sure the police check everything around the time of the allegation. Point out that if she fails to disclose anything or lies, then the case is likely to collapse and she could be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice.
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Will she be?

I suspect it is unlikely, and although other justifications might be bandied about, I suspect that a trial which would showcase the dereliction of the police in their investigation of the original charges is probably among the most telling considerations.
 
Nessie said:
Here is why there is such a problem;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42734185

Alison Saunders, head of prosecutions in England, thinks that the recent series of collapsed rape cases is a sign the system works!!!!!
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That's awful. When a rape trial collapses after more than two years of investigation and preparation, it seems to me there are only three possible scenarios:
(1) The accused was guilty of rape, but now will never be properly punished.
(2) The victim was raped by someone other than the accused, who will probably now never be punished at all because the case has gone cold, and an innocent person has suffered years of stress, uncertainty and accusation, and will to some people always be assumed to be guilty.
(3) The accusation was false, and an innocent person has suffered years of stress, uncertainty and accusation, and will to some people always be assumed to be guilty.

None of these is a good outcome.

Dave
 
Dave Rogers said:
That's awful. When a rape trial collapses after more than two years of investigation and preparation, it seems to me there are only three possible scenarios:
(1) The accused was guilty of rape, but now will never be properly punished.
(2) The victim was raped by someone other than the accused, who will probably now never be punished at all because the case has gone cold, and an innocent person has suffered years of stress, uncertainty and accusation, and will to some people always be assumed to be guilty.
(3) The accusation was false, and an innocent person has suffered years of stress, uncertainty and accusation, and will to some people always be assumed to be guilty.

None of these is a good outcome.

Dave
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One thing that can help at least a little is a well-publicized statement of exoneration by a high level official. It isn't a fix, but it at least makes the attempt.

I was quite proud of (and a bit surprised at) our then state Attorney General (now Governor) when he arranged a press conference to announce the total exoneration of all the students charged in the infamous Duke lacrosse case. The prosecutor responsible was disbarred, fired, and charged with contempt of court for his false statements during the trial proceedings. He ended up filing for bankruptcy.

It is a precedent I wish was followed more often.
 
quadraginta said:
One thing that can help at least a little is a well-publicized statement of exoneration by a high level official. It isn't a fix, but it at least makes the attempt.

I was quite proud of (and a bit surprised at) our then state Attorney General (now Governor) when he arranged a press conference to announce the total exoneration of all the students charged in the infamous Duke lacrosse case. The prosecutor responsible was disbarred, fired, and charged with contempt of court for his false statements during the trial proceedings. He ended up filing for bankruptcy.

It is a precedent I wish was followed more often.
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That is good, especially since so many people like the "no smoke without fire" suggestion of guilt, which is the antithesis of innocent unless proven guilty.

Saunders should be making clear statements to say that the cases collapsed due to insufficient credible evidence and/or the existence of exculpatory evidence and that means the men accused ARE innocent.
 
BBC report of a 70% increase in cases being dropped after the police had been found wanting regarding disclosure

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42795058

"Last year, 916 people had charges dropped over a failure to disclose evidence - up from 537 in 2014-15."

I think that shows the scale miscarriages of justices in the system.
 
What seems scary to me is that those are the ones where the charges were dropped - how many were not dropped?
 
In 2015-16 in Scotland the police reported 226,000 cases for prosecution and of those 26,000 were dropped without any action at all and of the 117,000 which went to trial, 17,000 were dropped or the accused was found not guilty. So, 43,000 or 19% of cases did not have enough evidence to convict.

But the police and prosecutor thinks that is a sign the system is working!!!

Details here;

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Crime-Justice/Datasets/DatasetsCrimProc/CPtab16
 
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Nessie said:
In 2015-16 in Scotland the police reported 226,000 cases for prosecution and of those 26,000 were dropped without any action at all and of the 117,000 which went to trial, 17,000 were dropped or the accused was found not guilty. So, 43,000 or 19% of cases did not have enough evidence to convict.

But the police and prosecutor thinks that is a sign the system is working!!!

Details here;

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Crime-Justice/Datasets/DatasetsCrimProc/CPtab16
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Okay. Definitely more.

More like two orders of magnitude.

And the scary part is that those are just the cases they lost. I'm not sure how to go about developing an accurate number of convictions which resulted from a prosecutor's failure to behave professionally.

It's reasonable to expect that number to be non-zero, though.
 
This FOI has some information;

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/number_of_mscarriages_of_justice

"Out of “78 individuals whose convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal between 1st April 2006 and 31st March 2009” the causes were;

- New Expert (non- medical) evidence: 7 (covering a range if issues from DNA to false confessions and psychiatric reports).

- Discredited expert witness: 3 (this is a single case with three co-defendants).

- New medical evidence: 3.

- Unreliable witness / miscellaneous new witness: 11 (basically where new information about a witness, often but not always the complainant, or new witness testimony has been obtained to undermine the safety of the conviction.)

- Non-disclosure of material to the defence -13 (the accidental or deliberate non-disclosure, by prosecuting or investigating authority, of material which might have assisted the defence or undermined the prosecution and which the disclosure rules say the defence should have had access to).

- Misconduct by police or other authorities (such as HM Customs and Excise) – 15 (15 individuals involved in six actual cases)

- Judicial / process failure: 10 (issues such as errors in summing up, jury directions, not making alternative counts available for the jury to consider – this includes two cases involving a ruling by the House of Lords to clarify a point of law about causation in manslaughter conviction)

- One case was referred on grounds of defence incompetence.

- One was a magistrates’ court case related to planning law

I think that only case was the defence and the rest were the police, prosecutor and courts says it all.
 
Nessie said:
In 2015-16 in Scotland the police reported 226,000 cases for prosecution and of those 26,000 were dropped without any action at all and of the 117,000 which went to trial, 17,000 were dropped or the accused was found not guilty. So, 43,000 or 19% of cases did not have enough evidence to convict.

But the police and prosecutor thinks that is a sign the system is working!!!

Details here;

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Crime-Justice/Datasets/DatasetsCrimProc/CPtab16
Click to expand...

The obvious reason why they push forward with weak/questionable cases is that they've succeed with similar ones in the past. You only have to look at the miscarriage of justice threads to see how often juries seem willing to ignore gaping holes in prosecution evidence. A lacklustre defence, a judge willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the prosecution, any or all of this could let cases that should have been thrown out 'succeed' in securing a conviction.
 
The main reason is to meet targets and because no one (cops or prosecutor) gets into trouble for accusing an innocent person. So sometimes a false accusation is a way at getting another who is not liked.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42892530

"A woman held in custody for more than 13 months before her trial collapsed has told the BBC she hopes someone will be punished for the failures which led to her giving birth in prison."

The accuser meanwhile....

"The complainant claimed she had been trafficked and forced into prostitution by the three defendants and had become pregnant after being raped in the UK.
It later emerged the woman was already pregnant when she entered the country in 2016, when she was examined three days after the arrest of Ms Bosoanca.
At London's Wood Green Crown Court, Judge Perrins said the defence had requested medical evidence about the pregnancy as long ago as August 2017 and had been repeatedly told that no such medical evidence existed.
This repeated failure to properly disclose the police doctor's report was, said the judge, "one of the more serious failings identified in this case and requires further explanation".

...which, along with other evidence was held back until day 2 of the trial.

This is what is happening WITH disclosure laws. God knows how many have been jailed before those laws because evidence was kept back.
 
Not intending to derail, but this has been a huge problem with the Lockerbie trial. A shedload of evidence confirming that the crime simply didn't happen the way the police and the prosecution said it did was withheld and has only recently come to light. Unfortunately I believe the disclosure law in Scotland in 2000 left it up to the prosecution to decide what the defence needed to know, so it wasn't illegal at the time.

And now that all this stuff has come to light, all we get is, he was found guilty in court so that's that, shut up and go away.
 
This case did not even make it to trial, thankfully. A police officer is accused of rape and an e-mail then surfaces, where the accuser admits;

"she only said what she believed the police “wanted to hear”, adding: “I told you I didn’t know him.”

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/ne...iry-rape-scots-cop-collapses-bombshell-email/

I am privy to reliable information that the cop accused of rape had said from the start he had no idea who the woman was, who was accusing him. That was clearly ignored by the investigating officers and would have remained ignored, if it was not for a subsequent review of the case. That came about after another witness had was unhappy about a statement they had made, which I believe was altered. The witness found out and complained.

Two years, 30 enquiry police officers and 200 witnesses. All charges have been dropped by COPFS.

If the Scottish legal system wants to retain any credibility, the police officers who stitched their colleague up need to be investigated. If they altered statements and coerced a person to make a complaint of rape about someone she had never met, they should be sacked.
 
theprestige said:
I don't see the problem here.
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I do. The cop said that he had never met her. She told the police interviewed her "only ... what she believed the police “wanted to hear”, adding: “I told you I didn’t know him.”

Now, if he says he never met her and she said she did not know him, the accusation of rape is.....what?
 
Nessie said:
I do. The cop said that he had never met her. She told the police interviewed her "only ... what she believed the police “wanted to hear”, adding: “I told you I didn’t know him.”

Now, if he says he never met her and she said she did not know him, the accusation of rape is.....what?
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I'm having trouble figuring out your quotes, and the timeline you're using.

It seems obvious to me that when investigating an accusation of any crime, it's vital that the investigators ignore the accused's protestations of innocence. Is there something about the case that makes this principle irrelevant?
 
theprestige said:
I'm having trouble figuring out your quotes, and the timeline you're using.

It seems obvious to me that when investigating an accusation of any crime, it's vital that the investigators ignore the accused's protestations of innocence. Is there something about the case that makes this principle irrelevant?
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I am not sure if I should take that comment seriously or not. Presumption of innocence means if the accused protests innocence and gives a specific reason why (in this case, never having met or knowing the accuser) that should be thoroughly investigated. In Scotland it is also a requirement under the Lord Advocates S164 Code of Practice to investigate all reasonable lines of enquiry, including that which is exculpatory evidence and likely to prove innocence.

In this case, a female makes an accusation of rape against a police officer. Job number 1 for the investigation is to correctly identify which police officer it was. For a reason I am not privy to, a certain police officer was identified and accused.

That police officer then claims he does not know the accuser and has never met her. If the police did their job properly, respected presumption of innocence and the LAG 164 CoP, that is a reasonable line of enquiry. Indeed it should be bloody obvious that there is a need to check and ensure the two have at least met and she can identify him as the police officer who raped her.

It later transpires that instead of doing that, the investigating police appear to have steered the accuser in the direction of identifying that specific police officer. She was telling them what she thought they wanted to hear. In interview training, that is an absolute no to lead or coach a witness or suggest certain answers are preferred.

To make it even worse for the investigating officers, at some point in an e-mail, she has admitted she did not know him, they have not met. But that has been ignored and buried by the investigating officers, who continued to claim that police officer was a rapist.

Only after that e-mail became known to the prosecution, the Lord Advocate has ordered the case dropped and there will be no trial.
 
Gregory Turner and DNA contamination

The facts are a little bit obscure from the links I found, but I believe that he was held in pre-trial detention for 27 months and found not guilty of murder in a jury trial. The DNA evidence was that the victim's DNA was found on his wedding ring. However, the defense was able to raise several points that were suggestive of DNA contamination. The most significant of those was that she contaminated the ring with her own DNA. The DNA evidence seems to have been the only evidence against him. It is unclear to me why they were testing his ring in the first place. Mr. Turner has gotten into trouble with the law on at least two occasions subsequent to his acquittal. Link1, Link2, Link3.
 
DNA on a soda can

Here is an instance in which DNA evidence was suppressed. "Maxton was arrested in June 2015 for the murder of eighteen-year-old Robin Pearl in the North Avondale neighborhood of Cincinnati. After being jailed for nearly a year, a jury found Maxton not guilty of the murder in June 2016. But it was only in the middle of trial that he and his lawyers learned that the police had obtained DNA evidence confirming Maxton’s innocence and identifying another assailant seven months earlier, which they kept hidden."
EDT
IIRC There was other evidence pointing to a different suspect.
 
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That evidence which does not suit is suppressed, speaks volumes about the moral corruption of those involved. Plus it shows there is a culture of not being able to admit mistakes and change the course of an investigation.
 
Unfortunately, some jurisdictions in the US have a culture of police and prosecutors trying to ruin the lives of innocent people out of sheer spitful racism.

Soul Snatchers: How the NYPD’s 42nd Precinct, the Bronx DA’s Office, and the City of New York Conspired to Destroy Black and Brown Lives (part 1)


Links to all the currently-published articles in the series here: http://www.exposethequota.com/

A number of police officers target a particular community for harassment, repeatedly arresting and detaining "suspects" for the crime of being black in the wrong place, aka "matching the description", or outright racial profiling and "stop and frisk".

Targets of the police harassment are held for days or weeks or months, in a few cases even years, forced to pay out bail money they can't afford, disrupting school, work, destroying opportunities and family lives. In some cases, the same person is harassed over and over, spending nearly as much time jailed as free. Police threaten local community members, activists, and journalists who try to report their harassment and get anything done to stop it. Police brutality is a common feature of these arrests.

Not many of these actually make it to court. Either the "suspects" are simply released, or the cases are thrown out before they ever make it to court. But families are still out the bail money, and lives are disrupted. And in a few cases, permanent disabilities result from the physical assaults sustained by the "suspects" at the hands of police.

Some of the officers have even gone to their targets' families and attempted to extort money, favours, sex in exchange for "leniency" for their targets; and promises of continued and deepened harassment if their demands aren't met. They're little more than bandits with badges.

There's a deeply ingrained culture of corruption that results in harassment of minority communities in many of the police departments in the US, and it's extremely rare that anything is ever done about it.
 
quadraginta said:
Richard Jewell comes to mind as well. And he wasn't ever even arrested. Just "a possible suspect".

People remember that and tend to forget he was the actual hero of the story. He's the one who spotted the bombs and got a warning out in time to save a lot of lives.
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To be fair, there's only really one side of the story there. I have no particular reason to mistrust his account, but it seems so odd that a case would proceed to such levels when there was so blatantly no evidence, that I suspect - as always - that there must be more to it.
 
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