Decline in prosecutions for rape to improve conviction rate

[nettie434]

On Newsnight tonight they are covering a Law Gazette investigation into a perverse incentive to improve conviction rates for rape by prosecuting few cases. ‘Where is the victim’s voice in this?’ asks Baroness Newlove:

www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/exclusive-perverse-incentive-contributed-to-slump-in-rape-charges/5102152.article

Newsnight link:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b8zk

It’s the opening item.

That is pretty outrageous. The use of conviction rates as a way to improve prosecution shows a really worrying misunderstanding of what they are, which is shocking since it was done by the fricking CPS. The only thing conviction rates really tell any of us is how good the CPS is at predicting the outcome of the case. Aiming for a 60% conviction rate when other crimes are supposed to have a 50% rate can only really mean that you will fail to prosecute a case who’s evidence, were it another crime, you would take to court. That is the only practical way to make the conviction rate higher. I’m sure they’ll talk about it as though they were wanting to bring their best people to the table on these cases and pull out all the stops, but a) they should have been doing that anyway and b) if they wanted to improve performance they could do that and keep the conviction rate the same - that would have seen more men prosecuted and more convicted and would have been an actual improvement in performance instead of a pretense.

The flip side of this, though, is that we have to stop looking at conviction rates at this stage (the number of guilty v. Not guilty/discontinued/etc. cases that have been charged) as an indicator of how well the criminal justice system is doing. Conviction rates as they are calculated only tell us how good the CPS is at estimating its success in court, which is relevant to whether they are meeting their brief to prosecute when there is a reasonable chance of success but not to anything else. We need to look at convictions v. crimes committed to tell how well our criminal justice service is doing in serving victims of crime.

There may be a sound case for having a higher conviction rate for rape and other crimes where victims may be particularly vulnerable if evidence shows they are especially damaged by a not guilty result. But that would be a matter of considering the victim, not setting a performance target to make the service look better.

Wait, so because people have complained about the low conviction rate for rape, the CPS have responded to this by only prosecuting the cases they were confident they would get a conviction for thus improving the conviction percentage for all prosecuted cases? Is that correct?

It’s not clear what has actually happened because they haven’t been forthcoming and there are all sorts of reasons that could lead to lower conviction rates. But if they set a higher target conviction rate dropping the less strong cases is a fairly predictable, possible outcome so it certainly seems likely it was a factor in the drop in prosecutions.

*all sorts of reasons that could lead to lower prosecution rates, not conviction rates.

Somehow this doesn't surprise me. But the fact that they've set a higher target for rape cases than other cases does shock me.

As PP have said, the threshold doesn't reflect the actual likelihood a crime was committed, merely the subjective belief that a crime was committed and can in this instance successfully be prosecuted. So why the higher threshold? Why would they do this, unless subject to the usual shitty misogynist myths about rape: women lie about rape so we'd better pass a really high threshold of belief before we go forward with this, much higher than we would for a man who was mugged (who might be perpetrating insurance fraud but on balance we'll believe him) or a man who says he was the victim of an unprovoked attack (who might have thrown the first punch but again we'll believe him)"?

The CPS aren’t exactly flush. It makes sense to only prosecute where conviction is likely. It’s far better to prosecute one case properly and get the bastard convicted than to prosecute three poorly and get no convictions.

@BarbaraStrozzi it’s not a subjective belief that the crime happened. It doesn’t matter whether it happened or not. It’s a professional belief about the likelihood of conviction. It doesn’t matter how much a prosecutor believes a rape happened, unless they have evidence that will convince the court to convict they can’t in good conscience bring the matter before the court at the cost of giving more resources to building cases that aren’t hopeless.

All beliefs are subjective, Velveteen, even professional ones. That's kind of the thing about belief. Just because it's institutionalised sexism rather than sexism at an individual, personal level, doesn't stop it being sexism. What we have here is an institutionalised belief system ("It's harder to get a rape case past a jury than a mugging case") based on the entrenched misogynist views of society as a whole ("women are more likely to lie about rape than people of either sex are to lie about mugging.")

Adding the adjective "professional" makes it sound like it's suddenly an objective thing, but it isn't.

What we're wrestling with is the continuing idea that "there are no witnesses to a rape, just her word against his" because women aren't allowed to be believable witnesses to the crime committed against them. Unlike a mugging down a dark alley where the victim is allowed to be a believable witness to the crime committed against them. This appears to apply even when the victim emerges from the encounter covered in bruises with strangulation marks round her neck ("She liked rough sex...") or was drunk and unconscious ("I tripped and fell into her vagina, m'lud" - yes, that is a real case, and yes, the guy did get off).

The CPS aren’t exactly flush. It makes sense to only prosecute where conviction is likely. It’s far better to prosecute one case properly and get the bastard convicted than to prosecute three poorly and get no convictions.

Except that's not what's happening here - they're prosecuting one which they're sure will win, to get a 100% conviction rate, rather than 3, where only one they're sure will win and two that might not, which would give them a 33% conviction rate. They're gaming the numbers, not making a practical decision.