Wrongful Convictions · False Allegations · Memory & the Courts
77 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
A Montana lawyer from a family of prosecutors argues that mistaken eyewitness testimony and pressure on doubting jurors send innocent people to prison — and that those who doubt deserve respect.
22 September 2026
The NSW government plans to let complainants in adult sexual assault trials give pre-recorded evidence-in-chief, trial ground rules hearings in three District Courts, and narrow court access to counselling records.
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
A retired civil rights attorney contrasts Michigan's compensation law for the wrongly convicted, which lets exonerees also sue, with Indiana's, which pays only if they give up the right to sue forever.
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
Research on who becomes an abusive officer is real but partial, argues Jordan DeVylder — and the US rate of police killings cannot be explained by recruitment screening alone.
19 September 2026
The Indiana Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling that the State suppressed evidence pointing to another man, affirming a new trial for Jason Hubbell, who has spent more than 28 years in prison for the 1997 murder of Sharon Myers.
18 September 2026
Angela Lipps spent nearly six months in jail after AI facial recognition matched her social media photo to a fake ID used by a bank thief. Her charges were dropped, and she is suing the city of Fargo for $10 million. An extract.
17 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
Organisers of International Falsely Accused Day counted observances in 68 cities across 15 countries on 9 September, from rallies in Argentina, Mexico and Chile to gatherings outside the Royal Courts of Justice and the Scottish Parliament, all pressing for criminal penalties for deliberate false accusers.
15 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
Four organisations have sued the Department of Justice in federal court after it failed to release records on the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, a federal police misconduct registry created in 2023 and shut down in early 2025.
8 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
A planned lawsuit claims the Department of Homeland Security lied when it accused Ramón Morales Reyes of threatening assassination.
5 September 2026
Wendy McElroy on International Falsely Accused Day, marked each 9 September on Simon Warr's birthday, and why the safeguards of Western jurisprudence exist precisely because accusers sometimes lie.
5 September 2026
Northern Territory incarceration has hit a record 2,800 people in custody. Jesuit Social Services on why investing in people, not prisons, makes us all safer.
1 September 2026
Gov. Bill Lee commuted Thomas Clardy's life sentence to parole, stopping short of the Board of Parole's recommendation that he be exonerated.
27 August 2026
The Human Rights Law Centre says a restrictive parole condition that stopped Sue Neill-Fraser from being able to claim her innocence in the media has been removed after a court challenge.
25 August 2026
New Haven will pay two wrongly convicted men $15.25 million each — yet Connecticut's estate tax can still reclaim 12% of compensation the state itself paid.
21 August 2026
A Malaysian doctor argues that after police referred a Sabah hospital sexual harassment complaint to prosecutors and the case was classified No Further Action, the accused's presumption of innocence still counts for nothing in public.
20 August 2026
Tyrone Noling has spent 30 years on Ohio's death row for a double murder he insists he did not commit; a rare clemency hearing let him put recanted testimony and an alternative suspect to the parole board.
19 August 2026
Acacia Lyn-Darr, exonerated in 2025 after nearly 12 years in prison, is suing Pueblo County and its officers over a conviction built on coerced testimony.
19 August 2026
George Bell served 24 years in prison before one of the city's highest-profile exonerations.
17 August 2026
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is pitching a plan to help shield local police officers who make immigration arrests from possible financial consequences if they are accused of on-duty misconduct.
17 August 2026
The family of a Memphis man wrongfully convicted of murder said a new hurdle has emerged a week before a hearing that could prove his innocence.
16 August 2026
Two NSW Police officers shared witness statements before submitting them as evidence. A judge said it “undermines confidence” in their accounts — then allowed the evidence and ruled the arrest lawful.
15 August 2026
The possibility of executing the innocent has gone a long way to change the national conversation about the death penalty.
14 August 2026
Jesuit Social Services is calling on the Victorian Government to withdraw the Corrections Amendment Bill 2026, which removes the right of people in custody to an hour in the open air each day and weakens the legal minimum standards for their treatment.
6 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
Bettina Arndt on Scottish judges and the push to tilt justice systems toward accusers at the expense of fair trials.
19 February 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
Two Toronto defence lawyers set out how false memories reach the criminal courts, and what R. v Tan and R v SKM show about testing recovered-memory evidence.
16 January 2025
The history of the Australian criminal justice system is littered with instances of innocent lives ruined as a result of false accusations and wrongful convictions.
6 November 2024
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
A law professor hopes an independent commission aimed at dealing with cases of wrongful conviction will stop cases like Alan Hall's taking decades to rectify.
19 August 2023
Eight Australian cases in which judges, lawyers and legal academics say prosecutors strained impermissibly for a conviction — from Gordon Wood to Shane Drumgold.
4 August 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
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
Lamar Johnson, sentenced to life for the killing, was released after judge found ‘reliable evidence of actual innocence’
15 February 2023
Bettina Arndt on courts withholding mobile phone evidence that could clear men accused of sexual assault.
11 January 2023
Bill Spedding was harassed and ostracised after police laid historical sex charges against him during the William Tyrrell investigation. The NSW Supreme Court found the prosecution was malicious.
1 December 2022
Prosecutors dropped all charges against Father Joseph Jiang. A judge has now ruled he met the legal burden to have his 2014 arrest record expunged.
8 September 2022
German researchers planted false memories in volunteers through suggestion and repetition, then erased them — with implications for the justice system.
19 August 2022
Steven Avery from "Making A Murderer" on Netflix (Netflix)
18 August 2022
Wealthy executives and celebrities increasingly turn to lawyers to fight sextortion plots demanding tens of thousands for silence.
25 July 2022
Admin: A must-read from Joseph A. Neuberger & Diana Davison on alarming developments in Canadian law (Neuberger & Partners LLP, Toronto Criminal Lawyers)
1 July 2022
Nicola Sara Watts was jailed for three years four months over a year of false complaints made through fake email, Snapchat and Facebook accounts.
22 June 2022
The former Justice Secretary says the move would prevent innocent people from having their lives ‘trampled over’
29 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
Prince Andrew has denied allegations made against him by Virginia Giuffre
10 February 2022
For those committed to preserving a society worth living in, few sights could be more dispiriting than that of mass rallies undermining the presumption of…
19 March 2021
The Australian government may fall because of unproven and extremely dodgy 30-year-old rape allegations against a cabinet minister – the unchecked power of the #MeToo movement and its woke media allies is destroying our society.
9 March 2021
An attorney for UCF professor Charles Negy describes the nine-hour inquisition the university mounted after his controversial tweets sparked calls for his firing.
13 August 2020
Robert Xie and his wife Kathy Lin say he was framed for the 2009 murders of five of her family. Two extracts from his appeal submissions show why.
24 June 2020
An appeal court confirms complainants in sexual assault trials are not to be granted better footing than any other witness or complainant.
18 June 2020
One of Australia's most respected former detectives, Colin McLaren, breaks rank to explain why he no longer trusts the judicial system — and why Australia still has no criminal cases review commission.
13 June 2020
New Zealand's Criminal Cases Review Commission opens for applications on 1 July 2020, leaving Australia the outlier with no equivalent body.
24 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
Weinstein’s conviction has established the “breakthrough” principle that a criminal conviction can be secured without reliable and verifiable evidence. The working class and poor will suffer the consequences.
26 February 2020
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
“We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.”
22 May 2018
On the trail of the IICSAthon Part 2: Still waters running deep and the trigger that opened the floodgates
22 September 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