Men being denied a fair trial in rape cases in the UK.

Roger_007

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sexual-offence-rape-cases-evidence-withheld-crown-prosecution-service-cps-lawyers-a8384106.html

There is a controversy ongoing in the U.K. about evidence being withheld by the prosecution service , (CPS), in rape and sexual assault cases, which would indicate that the defendant is innocent. So far they have discovered 47 cases where this appears to have happened.
The CPS have a legal duty to disclose all relevant evidence to the defence. The fact that they are not doing so would suggest that the prosecution service have a policy of getting a conviction at any cost in these cases even when they have evidence that the defendant is innocent.
Have we now reached a point where a man is deemed guilty in these kind of cases once a complaint is made against him?

Peregrinus

Well, there's obviously a problem. But, just to put things in context:

- Nothing in the report you link to says that the evidence was withheld by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS instituted the review after a number of prosecutions collapsed, and identified that evidence had been withheld, but the report doesn't say directly who withheld it. However the report does say that "the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) conceded that they 'get it wrong in too many cases'”. That might suggests that in at least some cases the it was not the CPS that withheld evidence, but the police - i.e. some evidence doesn't even get as far as the CPS.

- Nothing in the report you link to says that the withheld evidence "would indicate that the defendant is innocent". That seems to be an assumption on your part, but I think it's a mistaken one. The prosecution authorities are supposed to disclose all relevant evidence, regardless of whether it favours the prosecution or the defence, and a failure to disclose any evidence is problematic, even if it wouldn't be particularly helpful to the defence.

- I don't think we can say that there's a "policy" at work here. There were 47 prosecutions stopped as a result of this review, and in 5 of those cases non-disclosure of evidence was the primary reason for the stoppage. (in the other 42 cases the problem seems to have been more failure to gather relevant evidence in the first place.) But that's out of 3,600 cases; there was no such problem in 3,553 of them. So the policy, in fact, seems to be to comply with disclosure obligations; non-disclosure is very much the exception, not the rule.

- 23 out of the 47 stopped prosecutions were in London; no other police authority accounted for more than four. So I think the problem here may really rest largely with the Metropolitan Police. My suspicion is that it's not a policy of non-disclosure, so much as a failure in training/awareness, and/or a squeeze in resourcing. The headline is about non-disclosure of evidence, but the text of the article suggests that the main problem is in fact failure to complete investigations/gather relevant evidence and, yeah, that's the kind of thing that results when budgets and manpower are squeezed. So that's be my first guess as to the cause of this.

- And I don't think there's a systemic anti-male bias at work here; what this report looks at is the prosecutions that were mounted, but of course failure to investigate/gather evidence is also likely to have led to many instances where no prosecution was ever mounted, and those of course will have been outside the scope of the CPS review. There may in fact be far more sexual assaults that have gone unpunished because of this than there are people who have been wrongly prosecuted or wrongly convicted.

Mint Sauce

This was being discussed on LBC last night. One caller came on, who had been sentenced, convicted for 8 years, and served time. Came out that evidence that would have found him innocent was withheld, and in a lot of cases, it ends up being one persons word against another, with Jury balance deciding it.

This is not to say, that he did or didn't do it, or she is or isn't making it up. But I think it can be compared to the recent Belfast case, where women could be scared to come forward in what they beleive is a genuine case, or men weather they did it or not, are tanrnished, and everyones live is destroyed.