Jacqueline Hodgson

Criminal cases are commonly seen as a fight between adversaries of equal strength: the intrusive power of the State versus skilled defence lawyers advocating their clients' cause. The reality, according to this major new study, is rather different. The provision of defence counsel is often rudimentary and unsatisfactory. Based on one of the largest studies of legal professional practice ever undertaken, involving nearly fifty solicitors' firms, this book offers a critical examination of the practices and organization of defence lawyers in Britain. The authors show how defence lawyers discharge their obligations to clients from the moment of initial contact with clients through to the routine preparation and representation of defendants in both Magistrates' and Crown Courts. For the first time, this study reveals the role of paralegals and unqualified staff in providing defence assistance, and highlights how their inexperience and assumption of the client's guilt can critically undermine defendants' rights. The deficiencies highlighted by their research lead the authors to question the effectiveness of recent liberal and managerial reforms, with their excessive reliance on market-led considerations. The authors propose a cultural transformation in criminal defence work, a reassertion of the defendants' rights within an adversarial system, and offer constructive suggestions for improving defence services. Extensively researched and documented, this study is a major contribution to current debates about the criminal justice system, and as such will be required reading for all lawyers, scholars, and professionals interested in the administration of justice.

This Training Framework is based on the empirical study of the procedural rights of suspects in four European Union (EU) jurisdictions - England and Wales, France, the Netherlands and Scotland - conducted in the period 2011-2013. The study focused on three of the procedural rights set out in the EU Roadmap for strengthening the procedural rights of suspected and accused persons in criminal proceedings: the right to interpretation and translation; the right to information and the letter of rights; and the right of access to a lawyer before and during police interrogation, as well as the right to silence. The results were published in the book Inside Police Custody: An Empirical Account of Suspects' Rights in Four Jurisdictions, Ius Commune Europaeum No. 113. The objective of the training framework is to enhance the knowledge, understanding and skills of criminal justice practitioners - police officers and defence lawyers - in respect of the procedural rights of suspects in police detention. It seeks to do this by orientating the framework around the requirements of EU law on procedural rights, as set out in the EU Directives referred to above, and by suggesting appropriate training strategies. The framework incorporates best-practice identified during the observational stage of the research study, and is designed to be applicable across EU Member States. Since training courses for police officers and lawyers rarely focus exclusively on the procedural rights of suspects, the training framework is not intended to provide a model for stand-alone training. Building on the findings of the research, and the pilot training programme carried out as part of the research project, the training framework is designed as a tool to be used in the planning of training programmes on the procedural aspects of police custody, for both police officers and lawyers. In this regard, it highlights the procedural rights to be addressed through training, and the training methods that may be suitable for ensuring their effective delivery in practice. The research study and development of the training framework was carried out by the Universities of Maastricht, Warwick and the West of England, together with JUSTICE. Avon and Somerset Police and the Open Society Justice Initiative were also collaborators on the project.

Basing much of its analysis upon the first systematic empirical study of the French pre-trial process, this monograph breaks new ground in the field of comparative criminal justice. Moving away from idealised accounts of judicially supervised investigations, it provides a better understanding of the ways in which an inquisitorially rooted criminal process operates in practice and the factors that influence and constrain its development and functioning. The structure and operation of French criminal justice is set within a broad range of contexts of political, occupational and legal cultures from the French Republican tradition of state-centred models of authority, across the growing influence of the ECHR, to the local conditions which determine the ways in which individual discretion is exercised. The French model of investigative supervision and accountability is contrasted with more adversarial procedures and in particular, the different ways in which the reliability of evidence is guaranteed and the interests of the accused protected. Systematic observation of the daily working practices of police, gendarmes, prosecutors and juges dinstruction across a number of sites and time periods, provides a unique and detailed account of the ways in which the French criminal process operates in practice. The understandings and insights generated from this data are then set within a wider legal and political analysis, which considers issues such as the influence and interference of the State within matters of justice; a comparative analysis of the judicial and defence functions; and the extent to which ECHR fair trial guarantees are able to produce legal and ideological change within a process which depends upon a central and judicially supervised investigating authority. An informed knowledge of other European criminal procedures is increasingly essential for those working within UK (as well as comparative) criminal justice, if there is to be a proper engagement with, and evaluation of, measures such as the EUs proposed Council Framework Decision on Certain Procedural Rights in Criminal Proceedings throughout the European Union, as well as recent legislative reform in England and Wales that seeks to adjust the pre-trial roles of police and prosecutor in significant ways. This book will be essential reading for teachers, researchers, students and policy-makers working in the areas of criminal justice in the UK and across Europe, in comparative criminal justice/criminology, as well as in French and European studies.