Homicide Investigation and Miscarriages of Justice

This chapter examines how police investigations fail, resulting in wrongful arrests or the charging of innocent individuals or the failure to detect an offender. Both outcomes are a failure to achieve ‘justice’, albeit ‘miscarriages of justice’ incorporate far wider considerations. This chapter focuses upon the misattribution of criminal liability in a criminal investigation or the failure to identify those responsible for criminal offences. The variables involved in criminal investigation are many, often disparate and frequently emanating from beyond the police organisation, but this chapter concentrates upon (in)action and behaviours directly attributable to policing staff. There is now a bedrock of research that, in examining previous wrongful convictions, claims to have identified the most common ‘root causes’ of failure in criminal investigations. Of course, each investigation has their own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, but patterns may be discerned, with common features across failed investigations. These can manifest in a specific fashion in each case but have, at their heart, identifiable commonalities, which will be outlined in the context, primarily, of homicide investigations in England and Wales.