Lord Advocate defends Crown Office in wake of Holyrood inquiry

In this year’s SLN Annual Review, Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC addresses concerns expressed by the current Dean of Faculty, Gordon Jackson QC, that the Crown Office has become too closely aligned to the perspective of victims of crime.

Mr Wolffe refers to his evidence session with Holyrood’s Justice Committee, part of its inquiry into the Crown Office, recalling: “I quoted the words of Baron Hume that the job of the Lord Advocate is ‘to secure the equal distribution of criminal justice to all Her Majesty’s citizens in Scotland’.”

But he disagrees with the Dean on the issue of victims and independence. In his view “As prosecutors we cannot do our job if victims don’t have the confidence to report crime and secondly have the support to enable them to engage with the system and give their evidence effectively.”

Last year, some fiscals and others spoke out about what they saw as justice being skewed by government policy in domestic abuse cases.

Mr Wolffe, however, is assured by the numbers: “The statistics show an 80 per cent conviction rate in domestic abuse cases which isn’t out of line with other kinds of criminality that we prosecute. It doesn’t support the idea that we are bringing too many unwinnable cases. There are acquittals but that doesn’t mean there was a dereliction of the obligation to prosecute in the public interest or that there was prosecution against the evidence.”

So what changes does 2017 have in store for criminal justice?

On summary justice reform the Lord Advocate has a clear goal: “The ambition there is to deal with summary cases in quite a different way so we are not fixing trials that don’t run. Over 50,000 trials are set down each year but only 9,000 run. That means witnesses are cited and called to attend court. They make arrangements for travel and for time off work and are told to go home. That has to change.”

The other main aim is to minimise the presence of children and vulnerable witnesses in court: “The thrust of that work is to capture evidence at an early stage to, as far as possible, minimise the need for them to appear within the context of the trial itself.”

View the Scottish Legal News Annual Review 2017 online