Issue six of PROOF, subtitled THE OTHER ONES, was launched at a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice, in a packed committee room at the Palace of Westminster on Tuesday 16 April 2024.

PROOF is the occasional print magazine of The Justice Gap, which was founded in 2011 as an online magazine about law and justice, and the difference between the two. Both are edited by Jon Robins, a lecturer in criminology at Brighton University and a journalist.

The focus of the latest print edition, sponsored by the Future Justice Project (futurejustice.org.uk), is miscarriages of justice. The case of Andrew Malkinson, whose conviction was finally overturned after 20 years, thanks to pioneering work by the charity APPEAL, is fairly well known; so too, is the evolving scandal of the Post Office Fujitsu Horizon IT scandal, currently the subject of a public inquiry, which has cost hundreds of subpostmasters their livelihoods, liberty and in several tragic cases their lives. But there are other cases, which we hear less about. It is those other cases, and the manifestly inadequate system for dealing with them, that are the focus of this edition.

There are pieces here about the Criminal Cases Review Commission, and how its vital work is hampered by limitations on its budget and scope and the impossibly stringent criteria for references to the Court of Appeal; about the criminalisation of drill music; about a number of individual cases where miscarriages appear to have occurred; and ongoing issues around joint enterprise, the jury system, and IPP. As in previous issues, there are numerous photographs as well as illustrations by Isobel Williams and others, including one by a serving prisoner.

The event last month was hosted by Lord Tony Woodley and chaired by Barry Sheerman MP, with guest speakers including Gareth Peirce, Stephen Kamlish KC and Moazzam Begg talking about the Birmingham 4 case (four Muslim men jailed for a terror plot who claim they were fitted up by the police), Kim Johnson MP on her Joint Enterprise (Significant Contribution) Bill, and APPEAL’s Matt Foot and Nisha Waller.

For a more detailed account of the event (and better photographs than the one above from my phone), see Jon Robins’s own report, PROOF launch: ‘It’s so easy to convict someone for a crime they have not done’