Is this Justice?

I see that HM Coroner is unhappy that the defence team acting for the PC who was recorded pushing over news vendor Ian Tomlinson during the G20 demonstrations have refused to hand over the results of their post mortem examination. They claim legal priviledge and say it is a defence document and therefore may withold it from CPS and the IPCC. Now not surprisingly CPS, being lawyers and part of the legal 'game', say they have no quarrel with this, but it serves to highlight a major flaw in our adversarial legal system. The suspicion of course is that any decision not to disclose must mean it does not help the defence case. For me it brings into sharp focus the fact that under our system the search for justice is not paramount - it's the game that is.

Quite a few years ago a notorious murder was committed on my patch and as is customary I was allocated the case to follow right through trial, conviction and ultimate sentence. The case was complex and hinged on the defence submission of not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. As a result, expert psychiatric and psychology reports were commissioned by both the prosecution and defence - a total of nine if memory serves me correctly. It has always struck me as deeply worrying that, as if by magic, all the defence reports supported their proposition and the prosecution reports, vice versa. It became quite a battle of professional reputations and egos and not surprisingly the jury had the greatest difficulty trying to make sense of these eminent doctors in effect slagging each other off. They couldn't decide and a fresh trial was ordered and in the end only after some heavy handed summing up by the trial Judge, a fresh jury eventually delivered a 10 to 2 majority verdict of guilty to murder. Not at all satisfactory in my view, not least as a process for getting justice, but of course a very profitable game for all the professionals involved. I feel the answer is quite straight forward - all expert reports should be commissioned by the court, with disclosure to both prosecution and defence.