A Necessary and Welcome Move

Checks and Balances

We are pleased to see that a formal process will be put in place to review criminal convictions in New Zealand which are subsequently seen as being shonky.  Our small country lost a vital judicial safeguard, cross-check, and balance when rights of appeal to the Privy Council in the UK were removed.  

Now a review of suspect judicial decisions will be available. 

An important safety valve has been added to New Zealand’s criminal justice system with the third reading of the Criminal Cases Review Commission Bill today.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) will investigate claimed miscarriages of justice.

“We’ve seen how our justice system can very occasionally get things spectacularly wrong, even with rights of appeals, and there needs to be a chance for the innocent on the right grounds to seek a final review of their case. The CCRC is an important mechanism to enhance the independence, timeliness, quality and fairness of investigations into miscarriages of justice,” Justice Minister Andrew Little says.  “If the Commission finds there is a miscarriage they will refer the case back to the Court of Appeal to reconsider whether the convictions should stand or fall.  

It will be interesting to see who will sit on the Commission and whether it will have sufficient information gathering powers.

Dark Blots

Thankful for Progress . . . But More Needs to be Done

There are few things more sad than people being convicted wrongly.  There are few things more provocative than the state doing little or nothing to right the wrong.  The "corrective" being deployed in some jurisdictions is to set up an independent review authority which can go to work to examine further and test unsafe convictions.

The state of North Carolina, in the United States, provides one example:

A 70-year-old man was freed from prison Friday, after a panel of judges found that he was wrongly convicted in the stabbing deaths of a mother and daughter nearly four decades ago.  The judges heard from a DNA expert who said none of the evidence collected in the case matched Joseph Sledge. A district attorney apologized to Sledge and promised to reopen the case into the 1976 slayings.  "The system has made a mistake," district attorney Jon David said. "The wrong man is in prison." . . . .