Issue 282  25th February 2023

Juries in rape cases are more likely to convict than acquit a defendant, according to landmark research analysing nearly six million charges and every verdict reached between 2007 and 2021. The research, conducted by UCL’s Professor Cheryl Thomas, was commissioned by HM Judiciary after a petition was submitted to parliament calling for all jurors in rape trials to complete compulsory training about rape. The petition, signed by 16,445 people, stated that research showed jurors accepted commonly held rape myths, resulting in many incorrect not guilty verdicts. Thomas analysed almost six million charges against defendants, including 68,863 jury verdicts, between 2007 and 2021.

The analysis found that in 2021, the jury conviction rate for all rape charges was 75%, up from 55% in 2007. The jury conviction rate for all sexual offences rose from 58% in 2007 to 75% in 2021. Rape offences have the highest not guilty plea rate of any offence, which has consistently been the case for 15 years. The average jury conviction rate for rape was 58% - higher than for other serious crimes such as threatening to kill (33%), attempted murder (47%), GBH (48%) and manslaughter (48%)...

Domestic abusers will face tags and tougher management under new measures to protect women and girls... The law will be changed so that the most dangerous domestic abusers will be watched more closely. For the first time, controlling or coercive behaviour will be put on a par with physical violence, which will mean offenders sentenced to a year or more imprisonment or a suspended sentence will automatically be actively managed by the police, prison and probation services under multi-agency public protection arrangements. A range of agencies will have a legal duty to cooperate to manage the risks posed by these dangerous offenders. This will make it easier to deliver a joined-up approach to protect the public...

Government will also require police forces to treat violence against women and girls as a national threat, as set out in a new strategic policing requirement published today. This means tackling these crimes will be as important as tackling threats like terrorism, serious and organised crime and child sexual abuse...

The government is also supporting the Protection from Sex Based Harassment in Public Bill, which introduces harsher sentences if someone who deliberately harasses, alarms, or distresses someone in a public place does so because of the victim’s sex, with the maximum sentence increasing from six months to two years...

Convicted criminals could be forced to appear in court for sentencing, the justice secretary has told Zara Aleena's family. Dominic Raab is examining whether judges should be able to impose longer terms on those who refuse to appear. Ms Aleena's killer Jordan McSweeney refused to attend his sentencing, something her family described as "a slap in the face". Mr Raab told the BBC convicts attending was the "least the victims deserve". The plans were revealed during a meeting with Ms Aleena's aunt, Farah Naz...

Convicted criminals in other serious cases have also refused to appear. It means they do not hear victim personal statements which are read out in court before sentencing. Mr Raab is having discussions with officials about how to bring about the changes. He added officials were looking at how the move could be enforced because "you could be in a situation where you're physically having to manhandle somebody out of the cell". "I wouldn't rule that out, but fundamentally, if a perpetrator is not willing to come and face the judge... then I think we should be looking at increasing the sentence as an aggravating factor," he said...

The troubled common platform courts IT system failed to send out hundreds of important notifications over the course of nearly a year – resulting in 35 individuals not being fitted with an electronic monitoring tag when they should have been, the public spending watchdog has revealed. In a critical report on the progress of the £1.3 billion courts and tribunals reform programme, the National Audit Office said HMCTS's design of the digital case management system was ‘beset with problems’ and its implementation is having a detrimental impact on courts.

Last September, HMCTS paused rollout for two weeks after the system failed to send 3,011 notifications to partner agencies between June 2021 and August 2022. ‘It found this happened as the system could not cope with the volume of notifications,’ the report says. ‘HMCTS reviewed all 3,011 of these cases and investigated in more depth the 367 of these failures which it considered could have affected justice outcomes. It found that criminal justice processes were disrupted in 23% of these cases. For example, in 35 cases an individual was not fitted with an electronic monitoring tag when they should have been.’ The report also reveals that between March and October 2022, HMCTS recorded 231 critical incidents affecting users nationally...

A unique safety tech tool which uses machine learning in real-time to detect child sexual abuse images and videos is to be developed by a collaboration of EU and UK experts. Launching in March, the two-year Protech project will research, design and create an app that can be installed on the devices of individuals at risk of accessing child sexual abuse material. The app will be deployed voluntarily, and users will have full knowledge of its purpose and its effect on their device.

The safety app will monitor both network traffic and images viewed on the user’s screen in real-time. After being installed, the app will run silently and will not require user interaction unless sexual images of children are detected and blocked. Collaborators behind the €2m (£1.8m) project, which is funded by the European Commission, believe the tool could help stem the growing demand for child sexual abuse material online.