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6 Soc. & Legal Stud. 5 (1997)

handle is hein.journals/solestu6 and id is 1 raw text is: How THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM KNOWS ANDREW GREEN Conviction, Sheffield, UK OLLOWING AN UNSUCCESSFUL appeal by John Brannan and Bernard Murphy against their convictions for the murder of Michael Pollitt, their supporters said, in a meeting of the campaigning group Innocent, 'All Manchester knows they are innocent.' Nine witnesses had tes- tified that Pollitt was threatening Brannan and his friends with a gun, and so Brannan had stabbed him in self-defence. Only one witness, Pollitt's girl- friend, saw the stabbing, and claimed that her boyfriend did not have a gun. Like others convicted for serious crimes they say they did not commit, Brannan and Murphy say they, and the witnesses who give evidence for them, are telling the truth, and they and their supporters ask only that the truth should come out so that justice can be done. They are puzzled and angered when the truth they know is not publicly acknowledged, and this is so even in other cases where there is a successful appeal against conviction. Why does their truth not come out? Those professionally involved in criminal justice would respond that lay persons like these cannot make valid truth claims. Truth in criminal cases is established by courts of first instance, by assessing evidence put before them. When convictions are overturned it is not because prosecution cases have been shown to be false and appellants' cases true but because of errors in the application of law, or mistakes in the conduct of trials, or because new evi- dence shows that evidence adduced at trials was unreliable; at best, fresh evi- dence may show that an appellant had a stronger case than was put at the trial, and the jury members might have reached a different verdict had they heard SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES ISSN 0964 6639 Copyright © 1997 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 6 (1), 5-22

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