Many hands have been tilting the balance of justice

The biases against impartiality within the British system need to be understood - they extend all the way to the top

Miscarriages of justice are not simply the malign work of the police. If the problem were confined to the police lies and corruption that are alleged in the Bridgewater case and the rest of the system of justice worked well, then it is doubtful whether any of the defendants in the case would have been convicted of murder or, if they had been, whether they would have stayed in prison for long. The same can be said of the other notorious miscarriages of justice in recent times: the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and the Stefan Kiszko case.

Let me name the other parts of the system. There are the courts themselves, in particular counsel for the prosecution. Prosecutors are subject to a pressure similar to that experienced by the police in high-profile cases. While the police sometimes feel compelled to make an arrest, any arrest, and put convincing evidence in front of court even if it has to be "improved", so prosecuting counsel likewise persuade themselves that they must obtain a conviction at all costs. While prosecutors do not doctor the evidence, they do something which has precisely the same effect.

They withhold items from the defence team which would tend to undermine their case. It is called by the polite term "non-disclosure" and has been a feature of virtually all miscarriages. In the Bridgewater case the material that the defence never saw is said to include details of many interviews with the police made by the author of what we now know was a false confession. Nor were unidentified fingerprints on Carl Bridgewater's bicycle disclosed. When it is suggested to prosecuting counsel in such cases that their so- called non-disclosure is quite as reprehensible as police forgery, they invariably say that they faithfully followed court procedures. If they did, I say that the effect was to pervert such rules. Indeed, were it possible to review and to compare the sense of fairness of the criminal Bar as a whole, and the police as a whole, I would not expect to find any difference.

Then there is the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which rarely brings prosecutions for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice against the police involved in miscarriages. No charges have been brought following the overturning of the Birmingham Six convictions, nor in relations to the Kiszko case. If you ask the CPS about this, you will be told piously that it was believed that the evidence was unlikely to secure a conviction, which is a perfect excuse since nobody else sees the files. CPS inaction or timidity is explained by a misguided desire to protect the system by hiding its shortcomings.

In every miscarriage of justice, the judges themselves also bear some responsibility. The Crown told the Court of Appeal last week that the Bridgewater trial had been "fundamentally flawed". It can hardly be said that a judge who presides over a fundamentally flawed proceedings has done a good job. Even less can the three senior judges who heard an appeal in 1988-89 be exonerated. Much new evidence was produced pointing to the innocence of the convicted men. However, to doubt police evidence has until recently been almost an impossibility for a judge; it is as dreadful a prospect as he or she can imagine, since it puts in doubt not only the case in hand but also every future case.

Almost as bad as this blindness was the way in which Paul Foot, the journalist who campaigned ceaselessly for the overturning of the conviction, Ann Whelan, mother of one of the prisoners, and Jim Nichol, her lawyer, were made to feel by the Appeal Court that they had in some way been at fault in daring to find witnesses and get evidence re-examined. It was implied that they had wrongly interfered with the sacred course of justice. The appeal was turned down. Mr Foot wants the judges to resign in shame. I would rather see the three judges come back into their court, where should be assembled the wrongly convicted men and their families, and, wearing their red robes and their 18th-century wigs, bow low and solemnly apologise.

The Home Office and the Home Secretary of the day, too, are part of the system. At this time the Government has two reforms under way that beggar belief. In the first, Parliament will be asked to approve rules which limit the access to unused material by defence counsel in criminal cases unless it can be shown to be "relevant". How can defence counsel always know in advance what may be relevant or not? And in the second, a new code of practice would mean that evidence from police investigations is kept for only between one and three years. That rule would have meant that the Bridgewater miscarriage would never have been detected, as the evidence is nearly 20 years old. This is the work of a Home Secretary, Michael Howard, who believes that the existing system is not putting enough people behind bars and keeping them there.

What need to be understood are the biases against justice within the British system. At the level of the police, it is the pressure sometimes felt to doctor evidence. Prosecuting counsel can be subject to a macho will to win. The CPS dislikes prosecuting the very same police forces with which it works in daily partnership. The necessary aloofness of judges brings with it a crippling complacency.

Such distortions will ever be present, since they arise from the nature of the tasks being undertaken. It is the duty of the Home Secretary and Parliament to provide safeguards at each point. Of this aspect of his work Mr Howard has no understanding whatever.