The Secret Barrister- The Courage of Our Convictions: Appeals

 Summary

In chapter 11 of The Secret Barrister Stories of the law and how it is broken the writer talks all about our criminal justice system appeals service. This was a much shorter chapter unlike the rest of the chapters in this book but still in true Secret Barrister style we had an interesting case study and loads of facts included about our appeal system. We looked at a man who was falsely prosecuted for a sexual crime which he did not do.

The first point I am going to make is that any appeals for wrongful convictions are very likely to be unsuccessful because for your appeal to be accepted it either needs to be put forward by your sentencing judge or the court of appeals themselves. Once you get past the first stage ideally there will be new evidence which does not link you with this crime.

The second point that stood out to me was when The Secret Barrister writes about how in the majority of appeals the public is unaware and the media only covers few appeals, it is said you could count the number of media articles of appeals on a single hand. Because of this, we are likely to be unaware of who is being released into society and we the public would not know if the criminal is still out there which in some cases could be life-threatening.

Finally, the writer tells us that in order to get compensation for a wrongful conviction you must meet some requirements which The Secret Barrister says are near impossible to meet. It is, for this reason, it is unlikely that any of us who are wrongly convicted will get a single penny apart from the prison transport fee and this means some of us may struggle to get accommodation as we would have lost our lives, friends and jobs especially if we have served a long sentence wrongly.

That is all the points which stood out to me in this chapter, as always I may have missed many points and I have not written about the points in detail but rather summarise them and so I would highly recommend you read The Secret Barristers book yourself as it really is a great book. Please also either donate money via Paypal or buy me a book using one of the buttons at the side of this blog as that will mean I am able to continue this blog and continue my mission of getting more teenagers reading so it is not a dying habit.