Wrongful Convictions in China by Na Jiang

Author:Na Jiang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

6.2.3.3 England and Wales

Similarly, in the adversarial process of England and Wales, an overdependence on the proper defence hard to fully achieve in many cases frequently increases the risk of wrongful convictions.36 As shown from practice, “most solicitors are entirely passive” from presence in the police station37 to defence in court, so as to hardly protect the accused’s rights or due process.38

The inadequate defence partly results from legislation and practice that discourages solicitors to interfere in police interrogations. For instance, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 allows a jury to infer from the accused’s unreasonable silence or from something new, raised in court trial. If the accused fails to tell facts on counsel advices or only keeps silent, he or she may face the risk of the jury’s adverse inferences due to his or her failures in telling the facts or in explaining marks or presence at the scene. This risk requires counsels who involve in police interrogations and offer the accused advices, to testify in court for justifying the accused’s silence to fix failures, but passive solicitors in interrogations can escape from the risk. Together with their biases against the accused, solicitors often aim to secure guilty pleas and not to defend justice.39

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.