Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, as your Lordships already know, I was one of the minority of four to five in the Supreme Court in Adams in 2011, and I support the Government in their efforts here to give effect to our minority judgment. I recognise that in the light of the speeches in the House this afternoon I am now one of an endangered species. However, the truth is that four of us reached a clear view on this, including the then Lord Chief Justice, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who unhappily cannot be in this place today. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, this is a difficult issue and I do not suggest that the majority reached an absurd or impossible view. I suggest that it was wrong but, right or wrong, that is not now the question. The question is: what does the House think is the appropriate approach to the question of compensation for miscarriage of justice?

It is critical to bear in mind that in the course of this debate we are talking not about criminal justice or the presumption of innocence, or about whether people who cannot at the end of the day be shown beyond all reasonable doubt to be guilty should go free. Of course they should and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is right to say that it is better that 10 guilty men go free than that one innocent man be imprisoned. All that goes without saying but we are concerned here with monetary compensation. The obligation under Section 133 of the Criminal Justice Act, and under the international convention to which that gives effect, is to compensate only in a very limited and narrowly circumscribed group of cases. It is not all those who, having been imprisoned, are ultimately set free and presumed innocent; far from it.

Compensation is not paid and even under the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, would still not be paid, for example, to those who have been in custody, perhaps for a very long time while awaiting trial or during a trial, and are then acquitted. Nor is it paid to those who are freed only when an appeal, perhaps many months later even though it was brought in time, comes to be allowed. Nor is it paid to those whose appeal comes to be allowed not because of newly discovered facts but rather, for example, because of some serious misdirection by the judge at trial or because the judge wrongly admitted evidence, even if they have been incarcerated for many years. Very importantly, nor is it paid—and it is apparent to me that not all your Lordships fully understand this—in cases where an appeal, possibly after many years, comes to be allowed because the newly discovered facts have created a doubt as to whether the original jury, with these fresh facts in mind, would still have convicted the accused. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, clearly recognises that but certain things said suggest that others do not.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights, in its recent second report, published just a fortnight back, suggests in paragraph 73 that under the test of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, compensation would have been granted in Sally Clark’s case. That is the tragic case, as I wholly accept, about which the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, spoke so passionately both today and at Second Reading. Having now read the detailed judgment in that case, and indeed the commentary on it in the other case of Meadow, it seems to be entirely plain that compensation would not—I repeat, not—have been paid to Sally Clark under the test of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. Notwithstanding the doubts about the value of Professor Meadow’s evidence that emerged quite early in that case, Sally Clark’s first appeal was rejected by the Court of Appeal on the basis that the evidence against her remained overwhelming. There then came to light further fresh evidence—again, as referred to today by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy—regarding certain biological tests on one of the two children. That, said the second Court of Appeal, could—I repeat, could—have affected the jury’s verdict. It did not say that no jury could possibly have convicted in the light of it. With the best will in the world, I suggest that that would not have led to compensation in her case.

Compensation is designed only to compensate those most obviously and conspicuously wronged, apparent to all. They will have been incarcerated the longest, which is why it applies only in respect of an appeal out of time, and, if the Government’s approach is accepted, they will have been shown to be truly innocent and indeed that would have been recognised to have been so if only the fresh facts such as DNA evidence had come to light sooner rather than later.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I really must correct the noble and learned Lord. Perhaps reading a commentary or returning to published facts about the case and reading a shorthand account of it will not give one the proper understanding of what the evidence was that allowed Sally Clark’s appeal. I chaired an inquiry in which that evidence was placed before us. Medical evidence—slides showing the state of an infant’s lung condition—was never disclosed, and it was never explained why that was never disclosed at the time of trial. There was no doubt that it put a completely different complexion on the views taken by all those dealing with this case medically, and the case turned on medicine. I am afraid that the noble and learned Lord is not right in the description that he gives of why this case was overturned.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood]

I am of course enormously reluctant to take issue with the noble Baroness because she was in the case. I have here the transcript of the Court of Appeal judgment in April 2003, extending to 182 pages, by which on the second appeal it finally acquitted Sally Clark, but there it is; I pass to my second point. I hasten to say that these further points will not take quite so long.

Again with regard to the recent second report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, relating to Article 6.2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which has already been touched on, I just cannot accept the suggestion that the test proposed here by the Government is incompatible with the presumption of innocence. Not one of the nine of us in Adams in the Supreme Court thought that Article 6.2 had anything of value to say to the case. Today, very fairly, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, were not putting any particular emphasis on it either.

When refusing a compensation claim, the Secretary of State cannot say, “I think you are guilty after all”, but he can say, “You haven’t suffered a miscarriage of justice such as qualifies you for compensation. Of course your conviction was rightly quashed, you were set free and you are to be presumed innocent, but to qualify for compensation you have to establish more”. That indeed is also the position under the test of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. The underlying test of a refusal of compensation, even under his formulation, is that you cannot show that the jury would have acquitted you, they might still have found you guilty and indeed the evidence would have justified a conviction. That is the underlying rationale on which you still refuse those eventually acquitted under the test of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. It is not logical—I am afraid that the European Court of Human Rights is not always infallible —that the one satisfies Article 6.2 but the other does not.

Thirdly, in reality the test that is now proposed by the amendment is, frankly, a fudge, and it has all the uncertainties and disadvantages of a fudge. None of the many counsel who appeared before the Supreme Court in Adams—and they included leading counsel specifically instructed on behalf of that admirable institution Justice, which appeared as interveners in the case—argued for the approach now suggested and, indeed, that the majority of five reached as a sort of halfway house, as they felt, in Adams. It was indeed recognised by the Bar that there was no principled difference between this approach and the approach of compensating all who eventually succeed on their late appeals. As the Joint Committee points out in the same paragraph, paragraph 73, as that in which it refers to Sally Clark, the formulation of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick,

“is narrower than the amendment proposed by Lord Beecham at the Bill’s Committee stage, which was based on the Divisional Court’s modification of Lord Phillips’s test”.

That modification came in a later case, in Ali, and the fact is that there were such problems with the majority’s approach in Adams that it was chosen to modify it. But now it is proposed to restore the majority in Adams. For my part, I respectfully question whether that produces certainty and is more workable than the Government’s test.

I have always made it perfectly plain that I am entirely relaxed about whether under the Government’s approach the claimant has to prove innocence beyond reasonable doubt or on a balance of probabilities, or merely that the Secretary of State now looking at the whole case in the round is properly satisfied that he is being asked to compensate someone who is truly innocent. One of the plain troubles with the proposed amendment is that some—not many, I accept, but some—of those who are indeed undeserving will be compensated often to the tune of very substantial sums, hundreds of thousands of pounds it can be. I gave instances of this at earlier stages of the Bill and I do not propose to repeat them now. The fact is that there are cases which eventually succeed on appeal but there is other evidence or circumstances where, although this test would be satisfied, nobody really would regard the person as truly innocent.

My fourth and final point is just this. Before we came to decide the case of Adams there had been in this House, while we still heard final appeals here, the case of Mullen. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Steyn—who, alas, is no longer in his place—held in that case that compensation was payable only when the person concerned was clearly innocent. That was entirely consistent with the explanatory report of an exactly equivalent provision in one of the protocols to the European Convention on Human Rights. The explanatory document report said:

“The intention is that states would be obliged to compensate persons only in clear cases of miscarriage of justice, in the sense that there would be acknowledgement that the person concerned was clearly innocent”.

It is that intention which Clause 161 is designed to give effect to and, for my part, I propose to support it.