I hope you're right. As always, it's the rhetoric that worries me. What I'm reading now is, now that double jeopardy has been reformed, which cases should we be re-opening? I really don't like this approach.
If nobody was convicted of the crime, why isn't the case already open? Why aren't the investigators already trying to find out who did it?
If the case continued to be investigated, with an open mind, and more evidence turned up against the acquitted party, fine. However, to leap to re-open the inquiry only after reform of double jeopardy, suggests a continuing belief in the guilt of the acquitted defendant, without any additional evidence. Approaching a new inquiry on that basis is an open invitation to suspect-centred analysis of the material.
Rolfe.
I suspect that most of the nonsense being spouted off about "reopening" cases on the back of the new legislation and its seeming success in the Lawrence case is coming from either:
a) lazy and ill-informed journalists, who are usually writing for a pro-law-and-order audience who know no better either;
b) politicians, or those with a political angle to exploit, who also are hoping to appeal to constituencies whose zeal for "law and order" outweighs their knowledge of civil liberties and jurisprudence;
c) police officers, who may feel individually or collectively slighted or emasculated by acquittals in certain trials - particularly in high-profile trials where suspects were acquitted.
Fortunately, none of these groups of people gets to make the decision on whether cases are sent back to retrial after acquittal.
Bear in mind, also, that if a criminal trial results in acquittal, then if that verdict is safe (or was at the time it was reached), there are only two logical reasons of fact: either 1) the defendant was not the perpetrator, and the real perpetrator was not identified and tried; or 2) the defendant was the perpetrator, but there was not sufficient evidence of his/her guilt to result in a conviction. Both of these reasons are entirely just and fair reasons to acquit the defendant (although many people mistakenly believe that the second reason is unfair and unjust).
Sometimes, it's entirely rational and reasonable for the police (and prosecutors) to believe that they have identified the right culprit, even if they accept that there was not enough evidence to secure a conviction. When this is the case, we usually hear a police statement after an acquittal to the effect of "police are not seeking anyone else in relation to this crime". In the past, it would be pointless for the police to even attempt to find new evidence against an acquitted suspect, since there would never again be a possibility of using this evidence in a trial.
I suspect, for example, that there might be a number of (say) rape cases where the suspect was acquitted, but where minute quantities of semen evidence were left on the victim's body or clothing - quantities that might have been too small to accurately DNA-type in the past (or where the crime and trial predated DNA testing altogether), but which are now eminently matchable to a given individual with a very high degree of certainty. Before the changes to the legislation, this new information would only have been of use if the person identified by the DNA had not been tried and acquitted. But I'm guessing there may be a fairly large number of cases (especially given the high rate of acquittals in rape cases) where Mr A was charged with the rape of Ms B, without the benefit of high-probability DNA typing, and was acquitted. If the police subsequently find (perhaps years later, owing to new techniques) that Mr A's DNA was almost beyond doubt present on Ms B's clothing or body, then in the past Mr A would have been untouchable, having already been acquitted of the crime.
Would you (or anyone) suggest that it would be neither fair nor in the public interest for Mr A to be retried under this scenario, with a new jury able to consider the very robust new DNA evidence? I'm going to (not) go out on a limb, and suggest that such a retrial
would be both just and in the public interest. I suspect that many rape and sex-related acquittals from the 1960s through to even the early-2000s might fall into such a category, and I expect such cases to form a large proportion of the cases referred back to the Court of Appeal.
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