by Stella Kaye

Created on: January 22, 2008

THE UK JUSTICE SYSTEM IS TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE.

Less than a year ago I would never have thought there was anything wrong with the justice system in the UK. I always assumed we had the best justice system in the world as that is what I had been led to believe. I have always had the utmost confidence that its purpose was to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. I thought that wrongful convictions were a rare event but now I know different.

I'd never attended a court case before and was unaware of the totally shambolic scenario that can happen in a courtroom. It's only when someone you care about is treated unfairly by the state that you begin to wonder how unjust the justice system actually is. When you know first hand that a serious miscarriage of justice has occurred and no-one in a position of authority can do anything or is even willing do anything to make amends for it, only then do you question the system you once had ultimate faith in. The justice system we have here in the UK is an outdated institution that needs a complete overhaul or innocent people will continue to be imprisoned and the real criminals who pay people to lie on their behalf will continue to get away Scot-free. The jury can only make a decision on what is placed before them and if the evidence is all lies, an innocent person can be imprisoned. Anyone can be found guilty purely by accusation.

As with everything it all comes down to money. If you are an innocent man falsely accused and you have no funds to pay for an adequate defence you will be allocated the bare minimum on legal aid. But the Crown Prosecution Service will have endless resources at their disposal. You will come up against a brick wall whoever you turn for help and eventually it will be the brick walls of a prison that surround you.

The man I love has been imprisoned for crimes that never happened and he has been convicted purely on the lies of his accusers. His solicitor believed in his innocence but told me "I did everything I could in the time available but he is a victim of the system."
My reply to this was "Then the system needs to be changed." I felt as if he was a surgeon telling me that an serious operation had failed... sorry, we did everything we could. And now an innocent man is serving a virtual life sentence for things that never happened. Apart from myself and his immediate family nobody really cares. Justice has been seen to be done and society now wrongly assumes another criminal has been locked away.

Since the conviction,the more and more I have delved into this subject, it soon became obvious that wrongful convictions are far more commonplace than I had assumed. If innocent people are being subjected to such injustice on an almost daily basis then the justice system is clearly not doing its job. How can it be possible for an innocent man to be incarcerated at the expense of the British Tax payer to the tune of 30,000 per annum? Surely, if more money had been allocated to his defence in the first place then the state would not now be burdened with the bill for his detainment.

I am a firm believer that prevention is better than cure. Once imprisoned, further public funds are needed to get a wrongful conviction overturned. If the justice system had been effective to begin with, innocent people would not find themselves in such a dire predicament. Wrongful convictions take an incredible amount of funding to reverse since there is the added complication of getting the justice system to admit it has made a mistake. It is reluctant to do so, but no human institution is infallible and there must be more monitoring of the system to ensure that the guilty are punished and the innocent are protected.

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