Government

Abstract

Governmental intervention on the perceived problem of miscarriages of justice has been prompted by exceptional cases of successful appeal which fail to be overturned through existing appeal procedures. Thus, the RCCJ was not established in response to a crisis caused by concerns of an excessive number of successful appeals as evident in the official statistics but, rather, in response to the specific cases of the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, and so on, which exemplified a procedural problem with returning potentially meritorious cases back to the CACD when appeal rights had been exhausted (Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, 1993: 1–6).