Wrongful Convictions · False Allegations · Memory & the Courts
63 stories
New rape courtrooms in England and Wales and pre-recorded evidence in NSW are sold as easing delays and stress for complainants. What about a fair trial for the accused?
25 September 2026
The Court of Appeal found a deputy High Court judge should not have heard a suspended optometrist's appeal by video link from his bed, the day after surgery on a ruptured Achilles tendon, though it ruled the hearing caused no injustice.
23 September 2026
Christopher Poulter and Kevin Biggs, who died in 2004, exonerated of mailbag theft after new evidence emerged
22 September 2026
More than 15,000 sexual offense cases are clogging England and Wales’ senior criminal court, with survivors often waiting months or years for a trial.
21 September 2026
MPs, unions and police leaders urge the Prime Minister to order a Royal Commission on prisons and the justice system instead of piecemeal reviews.
21 September 2026
Ros Burnett called it the lowest circle of hell. The director of FASO on what a false allegation of sexual abuse does to the accused and their family.
21 September 2026
Khloe Simmonds, 26, has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to eight counts of perverting the course of justice over false rape allegations spanning seven years
19 September 2026
The Thirlwall inquiry found a complete failure to protect babies at the Countess of Chester — but the Guardian, the Telegraph and Peter Hitchens all asked why it reported at all while the CCRC is still weighing Lucy Letby's convictions.
16 September 2026
Appeal's campaign would make the state review the case files of every police officer sent to prison, so a corrupt officer's wrongful convictions surface.
11 September 2026
More than 100 lawyers stood in silence outside the Old Bailey in support of Rajiv Menon KC, who faces an unprecedented contempt of court prosecution carrying up to two years' imprisonment over his closing speech to a jury in a protest trial.
9 September 2026
Stacey Sharples was jailed for four-and-a-half years in March after admitting 10 counts of perverting the course of justice. The Court of Appeal has ruled that term unduly lenient and increased it to seven years.
9 September 2026
A woman who lied to the police falsely accusing ten innocent men of rape had her sentence increased following intervention by the Attorney General, Ellie Reeves KC MP.
9 September 2026
Khloe Simmonds was jailed for seven and a half years for eight counts of perverting the course of justice, after making false rape allegations against a series of men between 2018 and 2026.
7 September 2026
A 14-page Met document lists dozens of 'inappropriate terms' officers must avoid in reports sent to senior officers and CPS lawyers, and legal experts warn it tells police to abandon neutrality in records that later reach a courtroom.
6 September 2026
Marland Yarde, who played for Sale Sharks, saw his life ruined by a woman's false accusations
29 August 2026
Supermarket chain says ‘human error’, not its Facewatch technology, to blame for ejecting a customer
17 August 2026
Rooprit Gill, falsely accused in the Horizon scandal, is back working at her former Post Office branch.
17 August 2026
Editorial: A review ordered by Vera Baird should help the body tasked with identifying miscarriages of justice to rebuild itself.
17 July 2026
Matt Foot on the unprecedented contempt of court prosecution of Rajiv Menon KC, brought over a closing speech that cited Bushell's Case — the 1670 ruling, commemorated on a tablet at the Old Bailey, that established a jury's right to give its verdict according to its convictions.
15 July 2026
The psychologist whose report made Merseyside Police suspect Eddie Gilfoyle of murdering his pregnant wife now calls his own advice 'nonsense'.
3 July 2026
Patrick O'Loan draws a parallel between the grooming gang scandal and the handling of false allegations: in both, institutions feared activist backlash more than injustice.
27 May 2026
Filmmakers Fran Robertson and Jemma Gander report from Joe Outlaw's trial, where a jury heard the indefinite IPP sentence itself put on trial.
8 May 2026
The Falsely Accused Network argues it is time to charge false accusers with the offence of coercive control.
20 May 2025
Brian Thornton on how a rotten system ensures miscarriages of justice will continue, from disclosure failures to an overloaded CCRC.
5 March 2025
Police trawling and other tactics
Harvey Proctor on Operation Midland: the guilty men who wrecked innocent lives were never held to account.
4 March 2025
Mathematicians and statisticians questioned the shift-pattern chart that placed Lucy Letby at every suspicious incident on the Countess of Chester neonatal unit. An extract, with our own diagram of how a chart like that is built.
9 July 2024
A Bristol criminologist inverts the instruction: if police and prosecutors had to believe every claimed victim of a false allegation, would they accept it?
22 January 2024
An expert on media law explains how newspapers avoid defamation when investigating a story.
20 September 2023
Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey has been cleared of multiple sexual assault charges. Some say he faces an uphill struggle to return to his previous position as a top-ranking star.
27 July 2023
The headline of a report in the Age Newspaper on Wednesday 22 March 2023 read, “Gobbo seeks immunity deal to dob on police.” Gobbo refers, of course, to Nicola…
3 April 2023
Jonathan King on Prince Andrew, EMI and a corrupted justice system, and the campaign he says was built to stop him.
21 March 2023
Eleanor Williams is jailed for eight and a half years for lying about being raped and trafficked by a grooming gang.
14 March 2023
Why did Eleanor Williams frame innocent men for rape and trafficking? Helen Pidd examines what drove her lies.
14 March 2023
Clive Freeman is 79 and in his 35th year in prison for a murder he says never happened. Nine pathologists have since disputed the prosecution pathologist’s conclusion that Alexander Hardie was suffocated — and the CCRC has rejected four applications.
1 March 2023
Part one of an examination of corruption pervading police forces in Australia and the United Kingdom.
20 February 2023
In 2020, a British High Court judge ruled that actor Johnny Depp was probably a “wife beater.” In 2022, an American jury disagreed. Who got it right?
18 January 2023
A woman's compulsive lies to police saw her innocent ex-boyfriend jailed twice and confronted by armed officers at his home.
21 October 2022
Head of college of policing said force had ‘overreacted’ to criticism of the handling of historic sexual abuse
15 October 2022
One of the biggest miscarriages of justice in Britain during the present century has been the conviction of the entertainer Rolf Harris following several…
21 July 2022
The IOPC found DCI Neil Hibberd would have had a case to answer for gross misconduct over the evidence he gave at the trial of Ali Kololo, convicted of the 2011 murder of British holidaymaker David Tebbutt in Kenya.
24 June 2022
The singer, who was never arrested or found guilty and strongly denied the claims, was publicly named in a child sex allegation after a police raid on his home in 2014. He is now campaigning for a change in the law so that suspects are only named once they have been charged.
8 June 2022
The former Justice Secretary says the move would prevent innocent people from having their lives ‘trampled over’
29 May 2022
A review of a book arguing that people will lie about sexual abuse, and that the motive is generally money.
21 May 2022
Speaking out: Lady Brittan is seeking justice over the treatment of her husband, the former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, after false allegations were made…
1 March 2022
A jury unanimously found Richard Gidney 'not guilty' to every charge he faced
23 November 2021
To mark the tenth anniversary of his death ITV have broadcast another gratuitous ‘documentary’ about Jimmy Savile, Portrait of a Predator. Needless to say, it…
25 October 2021
Police trawling and other tactics
The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech shows the readiness of police to believe the unbelievable in child sex abuse cases.
12 September 2020
Former head teacher Richard Dunne is exonerated as the DBS closes his case, vindicating him after false allegations.
15 July 2020
THERE were dramatic scenes at Worcester Crown Court as a defendant, who went on to be jailed on four counts of perverting the course of justice, collapsed in…
25 June 2020
Rape investigations in England and Wales are being dropped when complainants refuse to hand over their mobile phones.
17 June 2020
Jailed fantasist Carl Beech will have to hand over his assets of £23,960 to his only living victim, the former MP Harvey Proctor, a judge has ruled.
9 June 2020
A serial liar who made false allegations of historical abuse lead to the wrongful imprisonment of a firefighter with an unblemished record of public service…
15 May 2020
The pair, known as A and B, told 'deliberate lies' about a VIP Westminster paedophile ring in 2015, prolonging investigations. The Metropolitan Police ignored advice to investigate the serial liars.
1 May 2020
A policewoman cried when she appeared in court today with three other officers all accused of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
6 January 2020
Sir Richard Henriques’s review found Met officers unlawfully misled a judge to obtain warrants against public figures falsely accused by Carl Beech.
5 October 2019
The Met had vowed not to shy from historical sex abuse after the Jimmy Saville scandal
5 October 2019
For 18 months Carl Beech was the star witness in a Met inquiry into a VIP paedophile ring that never existed. He was jailed for 18 years in 2019.
26 July 2019
Simon Warr on contamination, collusion and concoction: how abuse allegations multiply once compensation enters the picture.
25 March 2019
On the trail of the IICSAthon Part 2: Still waters running deep and the trigger that opened the floodgates
22 September 2016
Inside Time readers respond to a family's account of a false accuser and wrongful conviction, sharing similar stories.
2 June 2016
An Oxford study of 30 interviews finds teachers and carers cleared of abuse are ‘a new and growing class of victims’, left with wrecked careers and enduring trauma.
19 May 2016
Cafcass social worker Suzi Smith admitted falsely accusing Jonathan Coupland of abusing his daughter, and said police pressured her to stand by the claim.
9 August 2014
The failure of a few prosecutions won't stop the crusade.
19 February 2014