Is Mr Bates vs the Post Office reviving a wider public concern for alleged innocent victims of wrongful convictions?

by Dr Michael Naughton, Reader in Sociology and Law (University of Bristol Law School and  School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS))

This article asks if Mr Bates vs the Post Office is reviving a wider public concern for alleged innocent victims of wrongful convictions that was lost with the setting up of the CCRC?

Introduction

I remember Gerry Conlon once saying to me that he was glad that he was wrongly convicted in England rather than his native Northern Ireland. His reasoning was that it was so common for Catholics to be wrongly convicted in Northern Ireland during the so called ‘Troubles’ that those who were wrongly convicted were unlikely to even challenge their convictions because they didn’t have any confidence or faith in the system to overturn them. By contrast, Gerry continued, British people had such faith in their criminal justice system that when they found out through stories in the mainstream media, newspapers, television, radio, that innocent victims had been wrongful convicted they were so outraged that they bombarded their MPs and demanded that those convictions were overturned. (more…)