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Chapter 1: Introduction
Purpose of the Report
1.1 The purpose of this report is to present the findings of an evaluation of the High Court reforms arising from the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Act 2004. The research was commissioned by the Scottish Executive. The evaluation was undertaken by Mr James Chalmers, Professor Peter Duff, Dr Fiona Leverick, and Ms Yvonne Melvin of the University of Aberdeen School of Law.
Research Aims and Limitations
1.2 The main aims of the evaluation, as set out in the Research Specification, were to:
- Assess the impact of the reforms on the work of the High Court (and to a more limited extent on sheriff court solemn business).
- Determine the impact of the reforms on High Court practitioners and users.
- Evaluate whether the reforms have been successful in: introducing greater certainty that High Court trials, when fixed, will proceed on the appointed day; giving the defence more time to prepare cases and more and earlier information about the Crown case; and reducing the unnecessary attendance of victims and other witnesses at trial diets that do not go ahead.
1.3 It is important to note the principal limitations of the research. First, as is inevitable in criminal justice research of this nature, the interviews with key personnel were not conducted with representative samples of each group, but rather those who were willing and able to voluntarily give up their time to speak to the researchers and this report simply records the views which were expressed by our respondents. Some of their experiences might have been atypical and some of their comments might be based on misperceptions, and in some respects the statistical data presents a more robust picture. Second, the statistical data on case trajectories cannot be taken to represent the typical workload of the High Court. While the pre-reform and post-reform samples are directly comparable and thus can be used to evaluate the reforms, the time-scale within which the research had to be concluded meant that both samples exclude longer-running cases, which by their nature may be more problematic than others. 1 Third, there was some statistical information that it simply did not prove possible to collect within the timeframe of the research, such as reasons for continued preliminary hearings and information on the size of sentence discounts. 2
A Note on Terminology
1.4 In the report, the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 is referred to throughout as 'the 1995 Act'. References are to the current version of the 1995 Act: that is, incorporating all subsequent legislative amendments such as those made by the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Act 2004. The Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Act is referred to occasionally in the report and where this happens it is referred to as 'the 2004 Act'.
1.5 The reforms of High Court procedure made by the 2004 Act were developed from Lord Bonomy's review of High Court procedure (Bonomy, 2002). Our main data relate to the 12 months before the reforms were implemented, and 12 months after the reforms were implemented. These periods are referred to in this report as 'pre-reform' and 'post-reform' respectively.
1.6 Throughout the report, the abbreviation SLAB is used to refer to the Scottish Legal Aid Board and the abbreviation ECHR is used to refer to the European Convention on Human Rights.
1.7 Although it might, strictly, be appropriate to refer to 'alleged victims' where cases have not concluded or where the accused was acquitted, the researchers did not feel that this would be helpful. Accordingly, throughout this report, the term 'victim' is used for the purpose of readability. Such terminology is not, however, intended to imply any conclusion about the particular cases under discussion.
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