Police and CPS had key DNA evidence 16 years before Andrew Malkinson cleared of rape | Police

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• JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Defence lawyers often get asked how they can bring themselves to defend someone they know is guilty. Prosecutors are rarely asked how they can bring themselves to prosecute someone they know is innocent.

  They didn’t just knowingly keep an innocent man in prison. They knowingly let the real offender stay free to continue offending (as serious sex-offenders nearly always do).

  Its then head of complex casework in Manchester said: “If it is assumed that the saliva came from the offender, then it does not derive from Malkinson. This is surprising because the area of the clothing that the saliva was recovered from was crime specific.”

  However, he said “he did not see that there was a need to do any further work on the file” unless the case was brought to appeal, and then his focus would be on “bolstering” the case against Malkinson.

  No concept of what their job is even supposed to be (in theory, at least), let alone any intention of actually doing it. Just get a conviction. Doesn’t matter who you convict, just make sure it sticks and get your promotion.

  Liberal democracy is a fucking sham. Full of nice ideas that only work (in theory) if you completely ignore power.

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  • HeartyBeast@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Liberal democracy is a fucking sham. Full of nice ideas that only work (in theory) if you completely ignore power.

    Liberal democracy is the best system we have - unless you want to suggest an alternative. However all systems ultimately rely on their participants to play their role in good faith. Here, a group of people completely failing to give a fuck subverted the system - and those people need to face consequences.

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    • JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It is the best system that has been allowed to develop given the pre-existing imbalances of power, sure. But liberals have no theory of power, let alone any intention of redistributing it.

      What is the point of a free press if the press is owned by billionaires?

      How can you have free speech when power controls the platforms from which you can be heard?

      What use is the rule of law if it is impossible to adequately prosecute the wealthy and too expensive to adequately represent the poor?

      Liberalism is full of sensible ideas which cannot work in this reality. A reality that liberal leaderships are happy to maintain because they hold a big chunk of the power that needs to be redistributed. Umberto Eco offers a nice aside on this, in Ur-Fascism:

      It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

      Punch left, pander right, act all shocked when fascism takes over.

      This is a useful critique of liberalism from a Rawlsian liberal, who admits that even Rawls might not have an adequate answer: The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump. Worth reading in full but here’s a click-free taster:

      There are many other questions we could ask—about the growing influence of money on the political process, say, or about the rising cost of a college education and the obstacle it presents to achieving fair equality of opportunity. But perhaps it is sufficient to take note of the skyrocketing economic inequality that characterized U.S. society during the years in question. Rawls’s claim that his principles embody an ideal of reciprocity rests heavily, though not exclusively, on the fact that his “difference principle,” which governs the distribution of income and wealth, requires economic inequalities to be arranged in such a way as to maximize the position of the worst-off group in society. Robert Nozick once asked, in objecting to the difference principle, how we would feel about a principle that required inequalities to be arranged in such a way as to maximize the position of the best-off group. Nozick’s mischievous question was a fanciful hypothetical that was intended to cast doubt on the strength of Rawls’s argument for the difference principle. But if one looks at patterns of inequality in the United States in recent decades, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the basic structure of U.S. society has come closer to satisfying Nozick’s hypothetical principle than it has to satisfying Rawls’s difference principle. That is, the inequalities fostered by U.S. institutions have come closer to maximizing the position of the best-off group than to maximizing the position of the worst-off group.

      In short, the United States in recent decades has egregiously failed to live up to any reasonable standard of reciprocity, because its institutions and policies have blatantly failed to affirm the good of all citizens. If, as Rawls maintains, the stability of otherwise just institutions depends on their embodying an idea of reciprocity, then what we should have expected to see as a consequence of those failures is just what we have in fact seen: growing resentment and discord, and the degrading and destabilizing of liberal institutions. In one respect, the situation is even worse than this might suggest. Rawls’s point was about the stability of otherwise just institutions. Or, more accurately, it was about whether a candidate theory of justice could generate its own support if it did not meet the standard of reciprocity. The pre-Trump United States failed to meet that standard, but not because it was attempting to realize a utilitarian theory of justice that relied more heavily on sympathy than on reciprocity, and not because it was attempting to satisfy any serious theory of justice at all. Instead it was simply allowing, or even encouraging, the wealthy and the privileged to prosper at the expense of everyone else. And if even utilitarianism, which seeks to advance the general welfare, contains the seeds of instability because it fails to satisfy the conditions of reciprocity, then what are we to say about institutions that fail to satisfy those conditions because they neglect the worst-off and allow the wealthiest to amass almost unimaginable riches? What we can say is that they provide fertile conditions for the emergence of a candidate, and a president, like Donald Trump.

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  • Aux@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Your last sentence doesn’t make any sense.

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    • JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Clear as mud (very hard to track threads here) but I’m pretty sure I’ve already responded to a similar comment. Wall of text but you did ask (I think?).

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• LSNLDN@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t think I could have a more negative view of the police and criminal justice system at this point

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• merridew@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “The then head of complex casework [at the CCRC] in Manchester said [in 2009]: “If it is assumed that the saliva came from the offender, then it does not derive from Malkinson. This is surprising because the area of the clothing that the saliva was recovered from was crime specific.”

  However, he said “he did not see that there was a need to do any further work on the file” unless the case was brought to appeal, and then his focus would be on “bolstering” the case against Malkinson.”

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  Emily Bolton, Malkinson’s lawyer at the charity Appeal, said: “The documents are a shocking chronicle of how Andy was utterly failed by the body, which should have put an end to his wrongful conviction nightmare, but instead acted as a barrier to justice.

  By relying only on the CPS file, the CCRC missed the chance to identify disclosure failures so grave that senior judges have since ruled they would have rendered his conviction unsafe.

  Refusing to refer his case for appeal in 2012 and explaining why it would not conduct further DNA testing, the CCRC told Malkinson the cost of forensic investigation was not its “overriding consideration”.

  While science has advanced, basic testing that isolates the male chromosome, similar to that commissioned by Appeal in 2019, existed when the CCRC was first considering Malkinson’s case and was widely used from 2003.

  Refusing to refer the case for appeal in 2012, the CCRC said there was “no realistic prospect” that further testing would yield a searchable profile “capable of being compared with the national DNA database”.

  James Burley, Malkinson’s investigator at Appeal, said: “The CCRC’s internal comments show that in deciding not to commission any DNA testing, cost was at the forefront of their considerations.

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  I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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• mannycalavera@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A log of a meeting between the Forensic Science Service, the CPS and Greater Manchester police in December 2009 reveals that the CPS was aware of the potential enormity of the discovery.

  Is there any way to find out who was in charge of the CPS in 2009 and hold them to account? This is quite shocking.

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  • JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m sure you will be shocked to discover that it was SKSKC (aka Kieth). True to fucking form. The body rots from the head.

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