What we can do
This part of our Web site gives an introduction to the role we can play if you feel that you have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Our principal role is to review the convictions of people who believe they have been wrongly found guilty of a criminal offence, or wrongly sentenced.
We can seek further information relating to a case and carry out our own investigations, or arrange for others to do so.
Once the investigations have been completed to our satisfaction, we decide whether or not to refer the case to the appropriate appeal court.
The pages in this section set out how this works in more detail. We assume in our examples that the original trial took place at the Crown Court. In these cases, any appeal will be dealt with by the Court of Appeal. Where the trial was at the Magistrates’ Court, an appeal will be dealt with by the Crown Court, but in other respects the procedures which we follow are exactly the same.
What we cannot do – the limitations on our role
 Our role in any case is to assess if there is new evidence or new issues that might give rise to a fresh appeal. We have to perform that role within a strict legal framework. We are committed to review all cases thoroughly and objectively, but the nature of the legal framework means that, more often than not, we are unable to refer cases back to the Court of Appeal.
Why is this? Our legal role means that we are not allowed to perform a “re-run” of your trial just because your evidence was not accepted by the jury and the evidence of the prosecution was. We have to be able to identify convincing fresh evidence or issues if we are to have a chance of referring cases back to the Court of Appeal. If evidence was put before the jury from which they could properly reach conclusions, it is of no help that we might reach a different view – what we will need is new evidence or arguments.
So the Court of Appeal is not going to be interested in whether we at the Commission would have convicted you if we had been on the jury. Instead, we have to be able to say to the Court, “Look, here is a new piece of evidence, or a new legal argument that hadn’t been identified at the time of the trial, that the jury never got the chance to consider. It could have changed the whole outcome of the trial.” Only then will the Court of Appeal be able to ask itself whether the conviction was unsafe.
Our other duties
We have three further responsibilities that occur less frequently, but are also worth mentioning:
- The Court of Appeal can ask us to help in settling an issue which it needs to resolve before it can decide a case
- The Home Secretary can ask us for advice when he is considering advising Her Majesty the Queen to issue a Royal Pardon
- We can refer cases to the Home Secretary where we feel a Royal Pardon should be considered.
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