Imagine being locked up for 17 years for a crime you know you did not commit. Being made bankrupt, missing your children growing up, not being able to attend your parents funerals. Surely it could not happen to you, you are innocent of any crime!
The authorities will not give you the evidence you know they hold that would exonerate you. The Criminal Cases Review Commission tells you there is nothing to review, they are overloaded with requests. Meagre government funding only affords them cursory glance at your application. In short, you were found guilty, get used to being treated as a criminal and therefore of 'bad character'.
There is just one problem. You know you are innocent. You also know the evidence exists that would exonerate you. You could be forgiven for thinking this could only happen in some 3rd world despotic regime. But this is very much UK justice today, with between 10% and 34% of all those convicted actually innocent - depending on whose statistics you want to believe. It may be of no surprise that the 10% figure comes from the Ministry of Justice, who consider that 'acceptable'!
Regardless of which number you choose to believe, with more than 1.1 million criminal convictions in the UK each year, hundreds of thousands of lives are being ruined by wrongful conviction. Add to that the lives of their families.
A simple change to the disclosure of criminal evidence requirements is all that is needed to protect the innocent from miscarriages of justice, and to protect the public from criminals who remain at large because someone has wrongly been convicted in their place.
This is not the justice the taxpayer thinks they are getting, it is not justice at all!
Sign our petition today requiring the British authorities to disclose ALL evidence when a verdict has been delivered in criminal proceedings. Give those wrongly convicted the evidence they need to support their appeal. Our justice system should be transparent, accountable, and the steps taken by the authorities to partially disclose evidence verifiable as valid.