Garnier: chair and chief exec of ‘moribund’ CCRC should go immediately – The Justice Gap
Jon Robins Author: Jon Robins
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A former solicitor general has told peers that the miscarriage of justice watchdog is ‘moribund’ and called for both its chair and chief exec to stand down immediately. Speaking yesterday in a debate in the House of Lords on the King’s speech, Lord Edward Garnier KC highlighted last week’s scathing report into the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) by the barrister Chris Henley KC following its serial failings in the handling of the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson. ‘The Henley report opens to urgent public examination a state of affairs that those in charge of the CCRC should be ashamed of,’ Garnier said. ‘It should lead them to consider their positions.’

The CCRC chair Helen Pitcher has apparently decided to dig in and insisted that she is ‘the best person’ to do the job despite personal criticism from Henley as well as calls from Andrew Malkinson and the new justice secretary Shabana Mahmood that she should go. ‘I have been credited by the MoJ for substantially turning the CCRC round,’ she told the Guardian’s Emily Dugan. ‘…I honestly believe I am the best person to take this forward for as long as I have the opportunity to do so.’

Chris Henley criticised Pitcher for failing to apologise for the group’s repeated missing opportunities in a miscarriage of justice that led to a man spending 17 years in prison; as well as inappropriately ’taking credit’ for his exoneration when the investigative work had been by the legal charity APPEAL.

Edward Garnier was co-author of the influential Westminster Commission on Miscarriages of Justice report which was published in 2021 and recommended the establishment of the on-going Law Commission review of criminal appeals. The report was highly critical of the watchdog. The Conservative peer said yesterday: ‘Having read the Henley report, it is now my view that the CCRC unquestionably needs new leadership. If the chair and the chief executive will not resign immediately, they should be replaced.’

Garnier continued: ‘The CCRC cannot move forward with them in post. We need a full-time executive chair, with at least the standing of a high court judge and full-time salaried commissioners rather than current part-timers. It needs better and better resourced case managers. The commission, as presently organized and managed, is moribund.’

The peer said that the 2021 report had been written ‘in ignorance of the Malkinson case’. ‘But one has only to read the Henley report to see that, even without the hideous facts of that case, we reached very similar conclusions.’ He called for the CCRC’s controversial ‘real possibility’ test to be reformed to allow the watchdog to refer more cases and to ‘encourage a more independent mindset’. ‘The commission is presently too deferential to the Court of Appeal,’ he said. ‘It needs bold and determined leadership. It is my experience… it is simply not getting it.’

Garnier met with Helen Pitcher after he publicly criticised her refusal to apologise last year in the wake of Malkinson‘s conviction being overturned. ‘I came away from that meeting even more convinced that the CRCC needed new leadership. Had the Westminster commission known in 2022 what Mr. Henley now tells us, we would’ve been less kind.’