Protections in legal system not 'charter for criminals'

American ambassador to Ireland Thomas Foley with Walter Swift, an American wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to 55 years' jail.
Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons

PROTECTIONS IN the legal system have been described by certain sections of the media as "charters for criminals" but they are there to protect the administration of justice itself, according to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John L Murray.

Mr Justice Murray was speaking at a symposium to honour Walter Swift, the victim of a miscarriage of justice, in the Law Society yesterday. "The procedures are there to ensure that those who are guilty are convicted," he said. "We must remember that not only was Walter Swift wrongly convicted, there was another person who was never convicted."

Mr Swift served 26 years of a 55-year sentence for rape in Michigan in the United States. He was exonerated by the Innocence Project, which seeks to bring new evidence to court.

Irish trainee solicitor Niamh Gunn worked on the project in New York and found the evidence that exonerated Mr Swift. She told the symposium the project discovered a faulty witness identification and an investigating police officer convinced that the wrong man had been convicted.

Mr Swift told the symposium that the American criminal justice system was not the culprit in his wrongful conviction. "It was the individuals that were entrusted with administering it that wronged me," he said.

He said he is not bitter and held no anger against anyone.

The founder of the project, well-known US lawyer Barry Scheck said the legal system was learning from the project and from the exoneration of those wrongly convicted. He said that new techniques for identifying suspects were being developed, the videoing of police interviews now took place and there was a review under way of the forensic system.

He said problems of false confessions, unreliable forensic science, prosecutorial misconduct and bad defence lawyers all contributed to miscarriages of justice.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times