Clause 62 - Cases that may be retried
Criminal Justice Bill
9:10 am
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I was trying to be as historically accurate as possible; I am grateful.
We are passing a potential tool to the state that could enable it, if it became unscrupulous, to harass people. That is a legitimate area for the Committee to consider. That consideration must be balanced against the sense of legitimate public outrage when clear and compelling evidence subsequently emerges against a defendant who has been acquitted in a case that caused public anxiety. There will be strong grounds for thinking that although the acquittal may have been the result of a proper consideration of the evidence, the jury were in fact wrong.
Should we therefore provide such an exceptional tool? I should be interested to hear from the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon). There are powerful arguments for accepting it as part of the system of justice, but I would not be doing justice to
the public disquiet that I have heard expressed if I did not recognise that a legitimate argument can be made for bringing in a mechanism of that kind.