This comment on the government’s plans to restrict rights of appeal is intelligent, and fills in many details of the current law of which I was not aware.
The government has said it does not want prisoners released on ‘technicalities’ – proper paperwork not filed, search warrants not properly obtained and so forth. This, however, strikes at the heart of the rule of law. The only sanction courts have when executive agencies have not followed proper procedure is to refuse to convict. In such a case, ‘justice’ may be sacrificed in order to protect a more important principle. If courts will convict regardless of whether rules have been followed, the rules themselves become largely meaningless. As that column says:
The rules of evidence we enjoy separate us from those of police states. The rules must be obeyed in order to ensure justice. Once you start to accept breaches of the rules as being justified by the outcome (ends justifying means), then the whole law of evidence could begin to collapse. No one wants to live in a community where the criminal justice system is like the one that the good police officer, Detective Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), has to battle against in LA Confidential. The way to avoid that is always to run things according to the rules.
A better approach would be to streamline the law. True ‘technicalities’ exist when regulation is over-complicated, though I have to say that some of the examples the government has cited, such as proper search warrants, do not seem to me worthy of the term.