The ‘serious stain’ of more than 180 alleged rape cases which are more than two years old will be prioritised for trial this year, it was announced today. Senior presiding judge Lord Justice Edis said the new initiative aims to improve the court’s timeliness in dealing with serious sexual assault and rape cases.
The cohort of 181 cases which reached or passed their second anniversary in the court system on 31 December 2023 will be listed or heard by the end of July this year, where possible, he said.
The cases, which account for around 6% of all rape cases, had been delayed for reasons including the pandemic and the bar's protest action but the ‘primary reason’ and ‘one of the big problems’ was the shortage of advocates, the senior presiding judge said. 'This is an unacceptable state of affairs from the point of view of complainants, witnesses, defendants, and justice generally.
‘The system has recovered its ability to be productive remarkably well but that still gives us this big backlog of cases left over from the difficult times we’ve been through and receipts of cases coming in are rising across all offence types and in particular in respect of serious sexual offending, in particular rape.’
Some of the cases have defendants who are not in the jurisdiction while others are awaiting retrial and some have been listed for trial in August or September 2024, past the July deadline.
Edis said: ‘This is an initiative to get rid of what is, I think, a serious stain on our system which is the age of some of these rape cases.’ He added that once the 181 cases have been dealt with, the courts will look to deal with other old cases ‘before they get as old as this cohort’.
‘It is bad we have got 181 of these cases, no doubt about that, but that is actually only 6% of the total number of rape cases awaiting trial and the overwhelming majority will never get this old,’ he said.
The initiative comes from the Crown Court Improvement Group (CCIG), set up in 2021 to improve efficiency and performance in the courts by bringing together agencies from across the whole criminal justice system.
Tana Adkin KC, Chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said: ‘We support initiatives like this that turn the spotlight onto the delays crisis blighting our criminal justice system. The criminal bar has been working alongside the judiciary to try and address the delays to rape and serious sexual offence cases stuck in the backlog but we simply do not have enough specialist RASSO [rape and serious sexual offences] counsel left to prosecute and defend these important cases.
‘If the government is serious about prioritising rape cases then it needs to urgently invest in the dedicated workforce who are specially trained in this work. We are unable to retain and recruit the brightest and the best barristers to RASSO work if fees remain unequal between prosecution and defence and remuneration remains low when compared to other work.’
Law Society president Nick Emmerson said: ‘We agree with Lord Justice Edis that the long delays victims, witnesses and defendants are facing in accessing justice are unacceptable. Thousands of people are left in limbo for years waiting for their cases to come to trial.
‘Scant progress has been made in reducing the huge backlog of Crown court cases. Only increased funding across the entire justice system can reverse the negative impact of years of cuts and underinvestment.’
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