A miscarriage of justice is primarily the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime that they did not commit. The term can also be applied to errors in the other direction, and to civil cases, but those usages are rarer. Most criminal justice systems have some means to overturn, or "quash", a wrongful conviction, but this is often difficult to achieve. The most serious instances occur when a wrongful conviction is not overturned for several years, or until after the innocent person has been executed or died in jail.
Wrongful conviction or miscarriage of justice can also refer to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial. Wrongful convictions are frequently cited by death penalty opponents as cause to eliminate death penalites to avoid executing innocent persons. In recent years DNA evidence has been used to clear many people falsely convicted.
Justice Action is a community-based organisation comprising criminal justice and prison activists.
Justice Action sees restorative justice and mentoring as the way forward with social problems.
JUSTICE ACTION representing convicts in the host Penal Colony of Australia, having regained their right to political expression in the High Court of Australia last week, now exercise that right of political expression.
A miscarriage of justice is primarily the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime that he or she did not commit.
The risk of miscarriages of justice is one of the main arguments against the death penalty.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi By December 2005, the SCCRC is expected to rule on whether there has been a miscarriage of justice in Megrahi's case (his appeal [2] against conviction for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing was rejected in March 2002) and whether to allow a fresh appeal to the High Court of Justiciary.
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