The Minister for Justice's call to 'rebalance' the criminal justice system is more about votes than victims, suggests Rick Lines
There must be an election in the air. How else do we explain Minister for Justice Michael McDowell's recent call to "rebalance" the criminal justice system?
According to Mr McDowell, our current system is one in which "the needs, concerns and rights of victims of crime may have unintentionally become secondary to the rights and protections for the criminal". His solution? Reconsider long-standing democratic legal norms safeguarding due process, such as the right to silence and the right against double jeopardy.
How such changes would help victims of crime is unclear, although calling for them certainly helps a politician hoping to attract the "tough on crime" vote at the next election. Indeed, claims that the rules of the game are lax on criminals always make for good PR, even when they are not backed up by the facts.
Mr McDowell would, of course, bristle at any suggestion that he was using his office for partisan political purposes. Yet, as is so often the case, the assumptions driving his policies are not borne out by the evidence.
The Minister states that the issue of whether the correct balance is being struck between the rights of the accused and the prosecution was first raised at a conference of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Yet The Irish Times reported less than 12 months ago that the Director of Public Prosecutions' own data shows that under the current system, now called into question by the Minister, 95 per cent of cases sent to trial result in convictions, with nine in 10 of these convictions coming as a result of a guilty plea by the defendant.
If a 95 per cent conviction rate is indicative of a system unfairly skewed towards the accused, one wonders what Mr McDowell's vision of a "balanced" system looks like? Indeed, when nine in ten defendants admit their guilt in court, it hardly seems that the right to silence forms an undue barrier to successful prosecutions.
Even the conviction-hungry White House is at pains to point out that its controversial military tribunals planned for Guantánamo Bay detainees will maintain the right against self-incrimination and the right against double jeopardy.
Yet Mr McDowell's "five per cent solution" suggests that Ireland must limit these rights in order to deal with those very few people who, suspiciously in the Minister's estimation, are acquitted by judges or juries.
Victims of crime, and indeed society as a whole, are only served when the right person - not just any person - is held accountable for an offence. Anything less results not only in an innocent person being incarcerated, but a guilty person being left at large to continue offending.
The long-standing legal safeguards now seen as questionable by Mr McDowell are in place precisely to help promote the former outcome, and therefore protect not only the accused, but also the victim and the community as a whole.
Ireland is a nation all too familiar with the tragedy of wrongful convictions occurring when basic legal safeguards are ignored in an often politically-motivated rush to convict. While the needs of politicians may be better served by locking up just anyone, and therefore portraying an image that the forces of law and order have "closed the books" on as many crimes as possible, this does nothing for the cause of justice, the needs of victims or the safety of the community.
Rick Lines is the executive director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust