Judges rule on payouts for unsafe convictions

The Supreme Court redefined what constituted a “miscarriage of justice” after debating when compensation should be paid to people wrongly convicted of crime.

A panel of nine justices set a new miscarriage of justice “test” in rulings on appeals by three men who said they were wrongly refused compensation after their murder convictions were overturned.

Court president Lord Phillips said it would not guarantee all those entitled to compensation were “in fact innocent” but said it would ensure that when innocent defendants were convicted on discredited evidence they were not “precluded” from obtaining compensation because they could not prove their innocence beyond reasonable doubt.

The Ministry of Justice said its lawyers expected that compensation would “still only be paid in very few cases”.

In a majority ruling of five to four, justices ruled in favour of Raymond McCartney and Eamonn MacDermott, both from Northern Ireland, who were convicted in January 1979 of murder and membership of the IRA but had their convictions quashed in February 2007.

But the panel unanimously rejected a similar challenge by former aircraft engineer Andrew Adams, of Newcastle, who spent 14 years in jail before his murder conviction was ruled unsafe.

He was turned down because his conviction was quashed on the basis that the fresh evidence which rendered his conviction unsafe “might or might not” have led a reasonable jury to acquit.

The judges ruled that Mrs Adams’s case did not come under the ambit of Section 133 of the Criminal Justice Act, which provides that the Secretary of State for Justice pays compensation in cases “when a person has been convicted of a criminal offence and when subsequently his conviction has been reversed or he has been pardoned on the ground that a new or newly discovered fact shows beyond reasonable doubt that there has been a miscarriage of justice”.