The miscarriage of justice watchdog for England, Wales and Northern Ireland has continually failed to learn from its mistakes and its chief executive should follow the organisation’s chair out the door, MPs have said.
In a damning report on the leadership of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the House of Commons justice committee said Karen Kneller had provided it with unpersuasive evidence and her position was no longer tenable.
It said that the chief executive should follow in the footsteps of Helen Pitcher, who quit in January after an independent panel concluded she was no longer fit to be chair after the CCRC’s failings over Andrew Malkinson.
The justice committee’s report, published on Friday, said the CCRC’s delay in publishing Chris Henley KC’s review into the handling of the Malkinson miscarriage of justice case and attempts to minimise the damage to its reputation represented a “spectacular failure of leadership”.
It accused Kneller of giving “problematic” evidence to the committee as to the reasons for the delay and failing to acknowledge attempts by the CCRC to water down Henley’s findings.
The committee chair, Labour’s Andy Slaughter, said: “The committee cannot perform our scrutiny function if witnesses provide incomplete or partial responses to our questions. The information provided since the session establishes that Karen Kneller omitted important information that would have provided a more accurate account of how the CCRC handled the Henley report.
“As a result of our concerns regarding the performance of the CCRC and the unpersuasive evidence Karen Kneller provided to the committee, we no longer feel that it is tenable for her to continue as chief executive of the CCRC.”
The committee also deemed justifications given by Kneller for her attendance at expensive training courses in France using public money to be unsatisfactory.
The CCRC had “deteriorated significantly” and required root and branch reform, the report found. Criticisms included the current lack of a chair, for which it said the Ministry of Justice bore some responsibility; the CCRC’s struggle to secure a sufficient number of commissioners; and the move to fully remote working, which “is out of step with the rest of the public sector and seems unsuited to the nature of their work”.
The committee said that while Henley’s review focused on one case, it had “significant implications for the CCRC’s overall approach to its casework. The mistakes made in relation to Andrew Malkinson’s application should have been taken as evidence of systemic problems within the CCRC.”
Slaughter said: “For an organisation that is designed to identify failures within the criminal justice system, the CCRC’s leadership has shown a remarkable inability to learn from its own mistakes.”
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The report comes 10 days after Peter Sullivan had his wrongful murder conviction quashed after 38 years in prison.
The Labour peer and former justice secretary Charlie Falconer said that while it was true that when Sullivan first applied to the CCRC in 2008 forensic testing techniques were not sufficiently advanced to exonerate him, it should have proactively reviewed his case and more than 1,500 others when a more accurate test became available in 2013. Falconer said the CCRC was “generally regarded as useless”.
A CCRC spokesperson said it noted the committee’s recommendations, adding: “We look forward to an announcement on the appointment of an interim chair and to working with them in an organisation deeply committed to finding, investigating and referring potential miscarriages of justice.”
