New head of CCRC admits it may have made more mistakes
The new head of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has said the miscarriages of justice watchdog is failing to learn from its mistakes and may have rejected more applications from people who are genuinely innocent.
Dame Vera Baird (pictured), a former government minister and victims’ commissioner, was appointed on 3 June as interim chair of the CCRC. She replaces Helen Pitcher, who was forced to resign over her handling of the case of Andrew Malkinson, who spent 17 years in prison for a rape he did not commit but twice had applications turned down by the CCRC.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the day after her appointment was announced, Dame Vera said the CCRC seemed “incapable of learning from their mistakes”. She said she wanted to “root out” the culture which has caused them, and would do “whatever it takes” to reform the organisation.
She also said that she is writing to Karen Kneller, the CCRC’s chief executive, to “discuss her position” and future. Last month MPs on the Justice Select Committee (JSC) called for Ms Kneller to resign, accusing her of giving inaccurate evidence to Parliament. They also criticised working practices at the organisation, where most staff work from home.
Asked in the BBC interview whether there may be other people who are genuine victims of miscarriages of justice yet have had their applications rejected by the CCRC, Dame Vera said there was doubt over whether the body was doing its job in a “rigorous and positive way at all”.
In the Malkinson case, the CCRC declined to order DNA tests on forensic samples which later showed that another man had committed the crime Mr Malkinson was convicted of. The CCRC has since begun an internal review of cases involving DNA evidence. Dame Vera said: “There is a question mark over that, which stems from the cases we know that have been catastrophically handled. I think as we dig a little deeper, and as I talk to people who tried to get cases referred, we may find more.”
Dame Vera is was Solicitor General in Gordon Brown’s government, having been a criminal barrister before that. She was Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria, and then Victims Commissioner between 2019 and 2022.
Announcing Dame Vera’s appointment in the House of Commons, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said the interim chair had been tasked with rebuilding public confidence in the CCRC.
Labour MP Andy Slaughter, chair of the JSC, said: “I welcome the appointment of such an experienced and respected figure who has the skills and robustness to reform an organisation that has lost its way so fundamentally.”
After her appointment was announced, Dame Vera commented: “When the justice system makes mistakes, as all human institutions do from time to time, the role of the CCRC is crucial in uncovering them. It is vital the public can have confidence in an organisation whose constitutional importance is so central to a fair and just system.”
Perhaps the real crisis at the CCRC isn’t simply one of underfunding or caseload backlog—but of source. Perhaps the very pool from which commissioners and case reviewers are drawn has stagnated to the point of toxicity. Former prosecutors, judges, and career civil servants—steeped in the very culture that produced the wrongful convictions they are tasked with reviewing—are not neutral arbiters but products of the same ecosystem. Their distance from lived injustice, from the communities most impacted by criminal error, fosters not objectivity but inertia. They do not smell the rot, because they have grown used to it.
This unfit for purpose quango funded by the Ministry of Justice certainly needs to do a lot more to rebuild public confidence. As a case worker for a pro bono charity challenging a decision when they simply trotted out their usual banal irrationalities and relied upon that which amounted to the equivalent of papal infallibility when I challenged their abjectly poor decision in an application for judicial review. They will only in a few cases admit that they are wrong. Such was our organisation’s total lack of faith in the CCRC we no longer accept applications from those aggrieved by the conduct of the CCRC.
You’re saying that it’s the can of worms, which people are the least keen to open?
It humbly seem to me that there are those who want to pursue, why new evidence in the form of DNA wasn’t taken forwards; and those keener to look at the structure of the time, which encouraged an erroneous verdict in the first place. My suggestion is that Mr Malkinson was an ingénue in so many ways, in the first place.