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Hamlet without the prince (1)

01 January 1991

Hamlet without the prince
artdoc June=1992

On 6 March, John Patten announced the setting up of 24 criminal
justice liaison committees in England and Wales to `promote
better understanding, cooperation and coordination in the
administration of the criminal justice system'. The members will
include probation, prison and police officers, the CPS, clerks
to justices, magistrates, barristers, solicitors and social
services directors. They are to be set up by May. But judges will
not be present on the committees, after Lord Lane, the now
departed Lord Chief Justice, decreed that they should not
participate, although two senior judges will sit on the national
Criminal Justice Consultative Council.
The decision to exclude judges at a local level has been
greeted with dismay by some critics. Lord Justice Woolf proposed
the setting up of the Council and the local committees in his
report on the Strangeways prison riot in February 1991. He said
that the forums, which he described as an early warning system
for failures in the criminal justice system, should be chaired
by a senior judge, or it would be like playing Hamlet without the
prince.
Lord Lane's ban on the participation of judges at local level
was on the grounds of judicial independence. Critics hope that
the new Lord Chief Justice, Peter Taylor, will reverse the ban,
since judges are seen by many to be out of touch with reality and
the forums would at least bring them out of their isolation.
The exclusion of community and voluntary sector groups from the
committees has also been strongly criticised. It is their
campaigning which has exposed miscarriages of justice arising out
of police malpractice and judicial complacency, so their absence
does little to encourage a belief that the consultative
mechanisms are designed to tackle real problems in the criminal
justice system.
Commons Hansard 6.3.92 cols 300-301; Independent 13.3.92.

Statewatch, vol 2, no 3, May-June 1992