5.
WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS
5.1 Miscarriages of justice and the wrongful conviction of the innocent
Unlike the natural sciences, where the proof of a theory must satisfy strict tests of
falsification, in the criminal law guilt or non-guilt is a matter of probability, tested to the
standard of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. According to Michael Naughton of the University
of Bristol, under the adversarial system of justice:
Criminal trials are not a consideration of factual innocence or factual guilt. They
determine if defendants are ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ according to the evidence before
the Court, governed by the prevailing principles of due process.109
Running through the criminal law is the presumption of innocence. Strictly speaking,
however, an acquittal in the form of a finding of ‘not guilty’ is not equivalent to a finding
of actual innocence. An appellate court may overturn the conviction of a person for many
reasons, such as if the court finds that the judge erroneously directed the jury, or that the
judge should have excluded evidence as inadmissible (for example, for being illegally or
improperly obtained, or prejudicial). In this situation, the appellate court could order a
retrial, or alternatively could decide to acquit the accused. The latter ruling is not a
declaration of the accused’s innocence but may, for instance, be due to practical or
logistical matters, including the length of time that has passed since the offence, the time
that the defendant has already served in custody, a lack of surviving witnesses, and so on.
