Henry in CT is 4 years ahead of his time in his choice of quotation, with all the recent attention given to John Adams's biography and the miniseries based on it. Quite a man, for sure, and one I did not know much about until the recent publicity.
The miscarriage of justice here reminds me, closer to home, of all the asset forfeiture controversy (particularly here in California). There were many innocent people, only accused of a crime but never convicted and in some cases never brought to trial, where the police department seized huge amounts of their property. The standards of evidence were very low in some of these cases (though most of the time they did have to go through a civil proceeding and convince someone about the preponderance of the evidence, though far from the presumption of innocence I would expect in such a case).
Posted by
Steve, UK on March 29, 2008:
Reclaiming this money is nothing to with trying to get a "shred of justice" - your British Arthur is flat wrong, and I challenge him to find any government representative saying that's what it is.
What happens is that when a conviction is overturned, a judge will assess compensation for the victim, in terms of how long they were imprisoned. I do not know whether their former income is taken into account, but the general idea is to compensate them for lost income while imprisoned post-conviction.
I don't think there's any compensation for imprisonment pre-conviction if you're found not guilty in the first place, but that's another story.
The Home Office pays this compensation to the victim of injustice. They then promptly try to "claw back" some (not all) of the money, by saying that since the compensation is for lost income, reduced outgoings have not been subtracted. Therefore, they say, the award was over-compensation. So they want some of it back.
Personally I don't approve of this practice, but it's nothing at all to do with trying to punish "guilty" people who have "got off". It's about how much the taxpayer should compensate victims of miscarriages of justice.
I also don't think that it's done or not at the discretion of bureaucrats - I believe the policy is that it is done if (and only if) the victim is awarded compensation for their time in prison.
I think that a far better approach would be to require the courts to award compensation as a full and final settlement - subject to appeal of course, but not subject to new claims in later cases by either party.
Posted by
Stephen, UK on March 29, 2008:
I'm a brit and I agree with everything you've posted about this. What you haven't recorded was the howls of protest about this from many people in Britain - all I can say about the person who commented that it was the last gasp of justice is that they most certainly do not speak for British Justice - if that attitude ever prevailed I would go somewhere with a more transparent system of jurisprudence - like Tibet!!
The Cradle of Common Law - Comments
Posted by Joshua Zucker on March 24, 2008:
Henry in CT is 4 years ahead of his time in his choice of quotation, with all the recent attention given to John Adams's biography and the miniseries based on it. Quite a man, for sure, and one I did not know much about until the recent publicity.
The miscarriage of justice here reminds me, closer to home, of all the asset forfeiture controversy (particularly here in California). There were many innocent people, only accused of a crime but never convicted and in some cases never brought to trial, where the police department seized huge amounts of their property. The standards of evidence were very low in some of these cases (though most of the time they did have to go through a civil proceeding and convince someone about the preponderance of the evidence, though far from the presumption of innocence I would expect in such a case).
Posted by Steve, UK on March 29, 2008:
Reclaiming this money is nothing to with trying to get a "shred of justice" - your British Arthur is flat wrong, and I challenge him to find any government representative saying that's what it is.
What happens is that when a conviction is overturned, a judge will assess compensation for the victim, in terms of how long they were imprisoned. I do not know whether their former income is taken into account, but the general idea is to compensate them for lost income while imprisoned post-conviction.
I don't think there's any compensation for imprisonment pre-conviction if you're found not guilty in the first place, but that's another story.
The Home Office pays this compensation to the victim of injustice. They then promptly try to "claw back" some (not all) of the money, by saying that since the compensation is for lost income, reduced outgoings have not been subtracted. Therefore, they say, the award was over-compensation. So they want some of it back.
Personally I don't approve of this practice, but it's nothing at all to do with trying to punish "guilty" people who have "got off". It's about how much the taxpayer should compensate victims of miscarriages of justice.
I also don't think that it's done or not at the discretion of bureaucrats - I believe the policy is that it is done if (and only if) the victim is awarded compensation for their time in prison.
I think that a far better approach would be to require the courts to award compensation as a full and final settlement - subject to appeal of course, but not subject to new claims in later cases by either party.
Posted by Stephen, UK on March 29, 2008:
I'm a brit and I agree with everything you've posted about this. What you haven't recorded was the howls of protest about this from many people in Britain - all I can say about the person who commented that it was the last gasp of justice is that they most certainly do not speak for British Justice - if that attitude ever prevailed I would go somewhere with a more transparent system of jurisprudence - like Tibet!!
Read the article that everyone's commenting on, or post a comment about it.