The Maladministration of Justice.
(This episode is relevant to the Lucy Letby Case, because Chester Crown Court allowed Dr Dewi Evans,as a witness, to remotely monitor evidence given by other witnesses so he could adjust his own evidence to fit. This is something staff in most Crown Courts see it as their duty to prevent. Chester Crown Court staff, and at least one of the judges sitting there, were prepared to allow a major breach of proper procedure. This is not a good look as far as the "unthinkable" possibility of corruption is concerned.)
It has been known in civil service circles since at least the early 1990s that the root problem with the Administration of Justice in England and Wales is not any of the founding principles of the justice system, so much as maladministration, usually locally within individual courts.
John Major's government decided to actually do something about this (Thatcher and probably also Callaghan had wanted to, but had other vested interests to fry first) and there was warfare between ministers on the one hand and the Judiciary on the other. Ministers wanted to create Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Courts or something like it and the Judiciary saw this both as the the thin end of the wedge and the opening of what they knew to be an almighty can of worms. The effort was defeated, except that the Judiciary threw the ministers a single crumb by letting them create Her MaJesty's Inspectorate of Magistrate's Courts, because at the time Magistrates were mostly lay magistrates and not viewed as fellow judges. (Lay magistrates are now largely a thing of the past, even though they were the public's first line of defence against a crooked or despotic judiciary.)
The Lord Chancellor being a peer at the time, of course, this project was in the hands of his minister of State, Mr John Patten MP. Who had been running some crime prevention projects and knew some people who might pick up the the role of being Her Majesty's Inspectors of Magistrate's Courts and run with it. He may have been surprised by the consequences, or maybe not all that surprised, but they were dramatic even though the media did its level best to keep the public in the dark about this, where the public and even most advocates for justice system reform remain. When the media have been told to keep the public in the dark, journalists have a strange ability to keep themselves in the dark!
Anyway, it became apparent (in truth it was the original reason why ministers wanted to lift the lid on court administration) that there were huge differences in the amount of money collected in fines that different courts were paying in to the exchequer. From lots to pretty well none. The generous assumption was that some courts weren't very good at collecting fines and that this might be rectified by better management of records and a general application of elbow grease by those involved.
The Inspectors soon discovered that in some courts (especially Woolwich. Most especially Woolwich, Woolwich was remarkable!) the clerks had been diligently collecting the fines and fees -and taking the money home with them! Some clerks were prosecuted and they were jailed, which was a shock both to them and the judges who had to pass sentence. This and a lot of simple incompetence which was also uncovered, strengthened the case for extending the inspectorate to Crown Courts and possibly also the CPS. Nobody was rash enough to same "High Court as well?" out loud. Not out loud, tried not to even think of it, really. The time for that thought was not yet ripe.
In the meantime, now the Inspectors had got into the swing of things and knew both how the system was supposed to work and how it actually did, or did not, work, they naturally wanted to look to see whether any villians had escaped justice because of all this, and THAT awful truth didn't take long to emerge either!
Knowing, by that stage, which individual clerks might be at high risk of being corrupted, shall we say, the Inspectors started to look for signs of unwarranted prosperity amongst the clerking population and correlate that with cases which had never actually been called, or where important records were lost, or witnesses hadn't turned up and hearings never rescheduled afterwards. They were rarely able to track down cash payments to clerks to make a criminal case fall through the cracks, because there was a widespread (and suspiciously consistent) methodology for clerks to make themselves prosperous without direct payments of monies larger than a typical magistrate's court fine (those were paid in cash as a matter of course at the time). Thing was, the only way for a case to go to the Crown Court WITHOUT first passing through a magistrate's court, would be for the High Court to issue a bill of indictment. (This can and does happen, but usually only when compelling evidence of a criminal offence emerges during a civil case.)
So, being a clerk in a magistrate's court was the lowest rung of the ladder within that profession, but also the most advantageous strategic position for intercepting criminal prosecutions before they ever reached the Crown Court (which is where cases reach public and political attention, if they ever do). And the widespread methodology for accepting unwarranted advantages was, and still is, interesting.
The Inspectors (having come from crime prevention programmes) thought to look through the records to see how often clerks and other court staff changed addresses. And in those areas where the land registry was open, they were able to track the market values of the properties concerned and draw a graph of each clerk's rise up the property ladder. And in some cases, the curve was impressively steep. But those clerks weren't just able to AFFORD more than one might expect for each new home; they were also SELLING their homes for more than one might have expected through house price inflation and what they had originally paid. The houses were all being IMPROVED and yet the clerks were spending little, if any, of their own money on doing this.
It was possible to find out through planning records (this led to some planning officers coming under suspicion as something of a side-issue) and by talking to council building control departments, which contractors had done the improvement work on homes which clerks were using to trade their way up the property ladder at breakneck speed. And usually either the client was somebody other than the property owner, or the contractor had been given a letter of authority to buy the necessary materials from their usual trade suppliers using the account of an individual or company with no apparent connection to the property owner or client. (This is also a way of keeping the contractor's turnover below the VAT threshold, because VAT records really are a mine of information once a criminal investigation starts!)
And it was implausible that all the persons who benefited from having their cases lost down cracks in the criminal justice system all came up with the same methodology independently, or had any way of knowing which clerks they could safely approach, or any of the other things needed to pull this off. There had to be an organised crime presence which connected bent clerks not just with people facing prosecution and wanting to get out of it, but also with suitable building contractors and shell companies picking up the bills for building materials. Take a guess as to who owns the shell companies!
What the Inspectors uncovered was not just a methodology for corrupting the criminal justice system at the point where criminal cases enter that system in the first place, but a mechanism for corruption throughout public life, and which also gives organised crime a great deal of control not just over the criminal justice system, but also public life in general.
THERE IS NO REASON AT ALL WHY THIS MECHANISM CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK TO SMOOTH THE PATH OF FALSE PROSECUTIONS AS EASILY AS IT CAN BLOCK GENUINE ONES.
At the point where the pressure was on (and the evidence of need was freshly available) to extend the Inspectorate to Crown Courts as well as Magistrates Courts, and perhaps also to the CPS (and there have been prosecutions of bent CPS lawyers and officials, though not as many as may be needed), it was coming up to May 1997 and Antony Charles Linton Blair, a former junior barrister, sauntered into Downing Street and his Lord Chancellor was his long-standing chum and head of Chambers, Lord Irving and his Attorney General was Lord Falconer another long-standing legal friend. (All three of whom might or might not have known how it was that a Charles Linton, once arrested in the public toilets on Leicester Square for solicitation, had his case dropped without trial in the magistrate's court the next morning. There has never been an entry with those two names as first name and surname on the registers of births, deaths and marriages in modern times.)
In May 1997, the project to subject all of the lower courts and probably also the CPS to the same level of inspection as the police, died as if shot between the eyes with a Webley Greener humane killer.
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