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Thousands of people wrongfully convicted every year home Book Review by Anna Battista http://www.erasingclouds.com/1130book.html 1 December 2004 L A Naylor, Judge for Yourself (Roots Books) According to a Home Office bulletin, at least 3,000 people are wrongfully convicted every year in the UK. The data is mentioned by author L A Naylor in the introduction to her volume Judge for Yourself, How Many Are Innocent published by Roots Books (a publishing house based in the UK dedicated to documenting the political and social aspects of injustice in Britain). Naylor’s book, which analyses the miscarriages of justice phenomenon in the UK and the frequency with which they seem to be happening, opens with a foreword by Paddy Hill, one of the ‘Birmingham Six’, the men wrongfully imprisoned in 1975 for an IRA attack on two pubs in Birmingham in November 1974. 21 people died, but the men were not released until 16 years later when their case was overturned. The book is divided into 8 chapters, part of which concerns how a miscarriage of justice is created: police corruption, poor quality of forensic evidence, racism and the perpetuation of miscarriages of justice by the judicial system, are among some of the causes underlined by the author. The cases of three prisoners, Paul Blackburn, Sue Lucas-MacMillan and Keith Li, are also analysed in the volume through interviews Naylor did with them, while chapter 6 focuses on the cases of three wrongfully imprisoned men who have been released, Robert Brown, Satpal Ram and Mark Barnsley. Judge for Yourself is a very well-researched book and the first about miscarriages of justice to be so detailed and precise. “One of the things the public find hard to understand,“ Paddy Hill writes in the Foreword, “is just how easy it is to be put in prison for a crime you didn't commit.” Reading L A Naylor’s volume will help in understanding that miscarriages of justice can happen to anyone. A definite must not only for those who deal with the legal system every day, but for each of us. |
© L.A.Naylor 2005. All rights reserved.
