Stage fright in the CCRC?

In a 2021 review of the operation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (the Commission) for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Westminster Commission on Miscarriages of Justice had a significant concern that the Commission is at risk of being too deferential to the appeal court. Or, as I would say, stage fright might cause it to miss its cue.

A recommendation was made for change to the criterion for referral of cases to the appeal court.

Other concerns raised in that review included that the Commission was under-funded and over-worked.

Glancing at the online statistics published by the New Zealand Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), in the light of the referral criterion set out in s 17 of the Act, there are currently 136 completed cases, including 1 referral to the court. While there is only one statutory ground for referral (the interests of justice), the published grounds for not referring a case are more informative insofar as they separate out some specific reasons in 70 cases, leaving 65 described as “Not in the interests of justice”. On this approach, the interests of justice are separate from the specific reasons (active appeal on same grounds, appeals process available, applicant deceased, application withdrawn, incomplete application and no criminal conviction). Presumably, then, the interest of justice here means the prospects of the court allowing the appeal (s 17(2)(c)).

So, in 65 out of 135 (48 per cent) of applications that do not progress to the court, the CCRC has concluded that the prospects of the court allowing the appeal are insufficient to justify a referral. When combined with the other reasons for refusing to refer a case, the CCRC has referred 1 in 136 (0.74 per cent) of cases it has completed. But, separating out those cases where there are specific statutory reasons for refusal to refer an application, the 65 occasions where the prospects of an appeal being allowed are the criterion have included one referral, so that is approximately 2 per cent of these “prospects” cases.

Plainly, the prospects of the court allowing the appeal is a very significant consideration when assessing the interests of justice. That is quite sensible, but one can ask whether the CCRC may be being too conservative in making that assessment. Another thought would be that appellate courts set reasonable doubt at too high a standard.

Returning to the experience in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (where the rate of referral to the appeal court is about 3 per cent) and remembering the horrific miscarriages of justice recognised in the Post Office appeal cases, in which inappropriate reliance was placed on a computer accounting system, and more recently in the successful appeal in the Malkinson case (see the article in The Guardian on 27 July 2023) in which the Commission had twice refused to make a referral, not having carried out the necessary investigatory work, we can wonder whether the criterion for referral could be improved. The Westminster inquiry recommended (at p 37) that their criterion could be redrafted:

“the 'real possibility' test should be redrafted to expressly enable the CCRC to refer a case where it determines that the conviction may be unsafe, the sentence may be manifestly excessive or wrong in law or where it concludes that it is in the interests of justice to make a referral. By definition this would include all cases where it finds that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred including 'lurking doubt' cases.”

As funding will inevitably become inadequate, and resources inappropriately limited, the only protection that applicants will have against the CCRC’s wrongful refusal to refer cases will be a referral criterion that avoids the danger of what I have here called stage fright.

The New Zealand CCRC was established on 1 July 2020, so it may be too soon for an accurate calculation of the rate of referrals to be made. It is most unlikely that the New Zealand justice system is about four times more accurate at convicting people than are the courts in England and Wales (needing to refer only 0.74 per cent of applications, compared to 3 per cent for England and Wales). It would be more informative to compare the “prospects” statistics, if one could dig them out of the 2021 review for Engalnd and Wales. In any event, the CCRC should accept an error rate - that is, a rate of referrals which do not result in a successful appeal - as something similar to the rate of unsuccessful appeals that occurs in legal practice, which seems to be about 66 per cent. In a sense the CCRC is acting like counsel for the appellant where fresh evidence has been obtained to challenge a conviction, or where new considerations have been unearthed to call into question the appropriateness of a sentence. Counsel will pursue an appeal in those circumstances, being aware of the likelihood of failure from the point of view of statistics, and the CCRC should too.

In England and Wales the rate of successful referrals has been about 70 per cent (see p 35 of the review) and this has been criticised as indicating that more cases should be referred. One might say that it is the courts' error rate, not the CCRC's, that matters. Judicial blindness to the risk of error was a strong motivator for the establishment of the CCRC.

Three quite interesting appeals: live issues, police photography, and the plea of previous conviction

Three quite interesting appeals:

Refraining from irrelevancies

There are times when, no matter how interesting a point is and how helpful it would be to decide it, an appellate court will not address issues that are irrelevant to the appeal before it. A recent example is Moss v R (Bahamas) [2023] UKPC 28 (25 July 2023). Whether duress is an available defence at English common law to a charge of conspiracy to murder where the murder is actually committed remains undecided, because in this appeal, arising from a trial in which the defendant (appellant) had been charged with and convicted of conspiracy to murder, there was insufficient basis in the evidence to establish a foundation for duress. The defence was that there had been no conspiracy. It had been correct for the defence at trial not to seek to rely on duress, and the judge had correctly not left it with the jury as a potential defence. The question was only raised on appeal, and the Court of Appeal of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas had correctly rejected it.

The Board differed from the Court of Appeal on whether there was some evidence to support some of the requirements for a defence of duress ([57]-[58]), but agreed with that Court on one of the requirements, namely that there was no assertion in the defence evidence that there was no reasonable evasive action that the defendant could have taken to avoid the harm threatened ([68]).

The refusal to decide the common law point in this case is at [53], where the Board leaves it to a case in which duress arises on the facts.

Behind this refusal is, firstly, the recognition that counsel should not be made to do work that will be of no relevance to counsel’s case. What client would willingly pay their lawyer to research and argue an issue that could not assist in deciding the case? Similarly for publicly funded litigation. Counsel might be reluctant to take on appeals if there was a risk of having to futilely argue a cluster of complex issues that would only divert their time and energy unproductively. A second reason for the refusal to consider irrelevant points is that a proper factual context will assist in deciding what answer is supported by policy. The common law has developed piecemeal, working out case by case what is the reasonable answer to the issues that have to be decided in reaching a conclusion. But, you may say, couldn’t the Board in Moss simply have imagined that the defendant had had no reasonable opportunity to take evasive action? This might weaken the second reason for refusing to consider the point, but not the first.

But a third reason for refusal to consider points that have no basis in the facts of a case is more fundamental because it is constitutional. The courts refuse to trespass on what is properly the domain of the legislature. Courts decide the issues that arise between the parties to a case, the legislature addresses proactively broad matters of policy. This is not to say that the courts will decline to address hypotheticals in the course of examining the potential consequences of decisions on properly raised issues.

Police photography of people in public

The New Zealand Supreme Court has given leave to appeal, and, in effect, to cross-appeal, in Tamiefuna v R [2023] NZSC 93 (leave granted). The Court of Appeal decision is of great interest: Tamiefuna v R [2023] NZCA 163. I say no more in public (at least, not before the appeal has been determined, as it is sub judice). Save to say, it is about whether there is a right not to be photographed in public by the police when the photography is not in the course of an active investigation or enforcement need, and about the admissibility consequences in this case if the photography was a breach of the appellant’s right not to be photographed.

The plea of previous conviction

Speaking of sub judice, what has happened to the appeal in Mitchell v Police? The appeal was heard in the Supreme Court on 10 May 2022 (SC116/2021). From the Court’s Report on delivery of judgments for 2022 we can infer that this appeal is not considered to be unreasonably delayed, and that therefore the issues it has to resolve are complex. I have commented on the Court of Appeal decision here, on 23 September 2021. Very exciting.

Update: Mitchell has since been decided, as noted here on 11 August 2023.