Legal Aid

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken on legal aid. I normally leave that to those in this House with a wealth of expertise, particularly from the legal profession, and to those from whom we have already heard, as exemplified by the excellent speech from the noble Lord, Lord Low.

I want to take a little time to talk about the importance of access to justice. Let me talk about three people. Two years ago, I visited New Orleans for the first time. My Dorset friend, Emily, suggested meeting John Thompson. So, one afternoon, we were waiting just outside the French Quarter when John rolled up in his car and let us into his building. It was in many ways like any community building we have all visited. On the walls, however, were pictures of middle-aged black men, with their stories written below. These were stories just like John’s. He told us about his experience of being on death row as a convicted murderer in the Angola prison in New Orleans. He was exonerated after 18 years on death row. He was released suddenly—unemployable, homeless and mentally not healthy. He had to then prove innocence to qualify for compensation from the state of Louisiana. He overcame these obstacles to found his centre, Resurrection After Exoneration.

While we talking, an older man hobbled in with a styrofoam tray of fried chicken. Two months previously he had been exonerated after 30 years on death row. Almost 20 people have been victims of this gross miscarriage of justice. They were all in the wrong place at the wrong time and too poor to afford decent legal representation. All were helped by the Innocence Project New Orleans, established by my friend from Dorset, Emily Bolton. She qualified as a lawyer first in Louisiana and, subsequently, here when she moved home in 2004.

Meeting John really brought home to me the importance of credible legal aid and access to justice. Yesterday Emily emailed me. She said that,

“cuts to police and CPS are eroding the quality of prosecution evidence. In addition, the cuts to legal aid are making miscarriages of justice more likely. This is because the fee structures discourage proactive work by defence solicitors and even the most conscientious among them are unable to do the work needed to achieve justice for their clients pro bono”.

This is much as my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith said.

Barristers are forced to do more last-minute work because solicitors have not sought their own answers to the questions posed by the prosecution evidence and their clients. As a result, it is becoming rarer for the courts to be presented with a fair and complete picture of the case and the system’s accuracy is fatally undermined. In turn, the Criminal Cases Review Commission is working with 30% less money on 70% more applications from prisoners to have their cases reviewed. The aspirational goal is that prisoners will serve only three years before having a wrongful conviction overturned. The reality is far longer, as a period of time will pass before we correct our mistakes.

What do these statistics mean for the people who the system is designed to protect and serve? Let me tell your Lordships a little about Mr Jamie Green, a fisherman from the Isle of Wight. Jamie is a prisoner for whom these systemic dysfunctions and delays in the criminal justice system have meant that he has been waiting for more than five years to have what is now clearly a wrongful conviction quashed. As the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, was speaking, the funeral of Jamie’s wife of 26 years, Nikki Green, began. Nikki died of cancer last Monday, before her husband could be exonerated and freed. Jamie will have accompanied her coffin into the service in Newport in shackles, accompanied by security officers who will return him to prison after the service. Tonight, when we leave this House, Jamie will be contemplating all he has lost, alone in his cell. This is the human cost of trying to do justice on the cheap. Because of underfunding of the system, Jamie could not be there to help his wife through her chemotherapy or try to bring comfort to their children. He could not provide for his family during such trying times. Jamie will never again see his wife alive, as a free man.

Jamie is represented by the Centre for Criminal Appeals, a new non-profit criminal appeals practice established by my friend Emily, which is raising private grant funding and donations to cover the work that legal aid will not pay for and that the commission cannot create time for. The centre estimates that in some cases this is at least 50% of the work needed to prove that a conviction is unsafe to the satisfaction of the Court of Appeal. Every wrongful conviction which the centre gets overturned saves the taxpayer the cost of incarceration—an average cost of £25,000 per year. For every one the guilty party is free and unpunished, but of course this is about so much more than that. How many more people like Jamie and his family must be irrevocably harmed by the cuts to criminal justice funding? As we debate the future of legal aid, we must ensure that the tragedy blighting the Green family is not repeated.