Submission to APPG on Miscarriages of Justice 2019

This submission approaches only two legal issues that give rise to miscarriages of justice – complicity and coercion. It is in FOUR parts: • PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING CRIMINAL LAW (Starting page 2): A simple summary. • PART TWO: COMPLICITY (Starting page 4): In complicity, errors of law have applied high culpability to those least involved and, particularly in homicide, imposed the toughest of penalties. • PART THREE: COERCION (Starting page 12): In coercion, errors of law have too tightly confined the defence of duress. An absence of legal defences has led to high culpability and significant punishment for those only involved due to the criminal acts of others. This particularly affects women coerced to commit crime, where culpability lies with the perpetrators of coercive control. • PART FOUR: SOME SIMPLE SOLUTIONS (Starting page 13): The errors on complicity and coercion logically mean that (in the context of both complicity and coercion) some people in prison are not criminally culpable or have been too harshly punished. The consequence is that law and practice in relation to complicity and coercion have contributed, in my view, to over criminalization and over incarceration, both of which are miscarriages of justice. In part 4, I suggest some simple solutions.