Lawrence killing changed criminal justice in England

DOUBLE jeopardy in England and Wales was abolished in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 but the new powers to retry cases have only been used a handful of times since they were introduced in 2005.

The decision to look again at double jeopardy resulted from the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993 in what many believe was a racially motivated attack by white thugs.

The initial trial of two white teenagers - Neil Acourt, then 17, and Luke Knight, who was 16 - broke down because the Crown Prosecution Service said it had insufficient evidence with many believing that the killers had escaped justice.

There were allegations that the Crown had mishandled the case and police had withheld evidence. A private prosecution by the Lawrence family was then unable to go ahead in 1994 because of the double jeopardy law.

A subsequent report by Lord MacPherson recommended in 1999 that the 800-year-old legal principle of double jeopardy be reviewed.

The 2003 act then allowed prosecutors to revisit cases for serious crimes including rape, manslaughter, kidnap, murder, armed robbery and serious drugs offences.

Despite opposition from many lawyers, it was also decided to make the new law retrospective to allow cases from the past to be reopened.

But each case could only be retried once and it required new evidence to be brought forward. The police have confirmed that they are looking again at the Lawrence case, but there has been no trial.

The first successful case to be retried was of Billy Dunlop who was found guilty of murdering a pizza delivery girl Julie Hogg in Birmingham in 1989.

He was tried twice in 1991 and when the juries failed to reach a verdict the Crown Prosecution Service was unable to try a third time until the new law was passed.

Dunlop was then convicted in 2006 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 17 years. The court heard that he had confessed the murder to a prison officer while in jail serving a sentence for a different crime.

However, it was not until 2009 that the first criminal originally found innocent was successfully retried.

Mario Celaire, a former semi-professional footballer, was found guilty of the murder of his ex-girlfriend Cassandra McDermott in July last year.Originally he was cleared of her murder by a jury in 2002, but police were able to reopen the case when they found similarities in another brutal attack by Celaire on another woman Kara Hoyte who survived to identify him and claim that he had confessed to murdering McDermott.

Celaire had attacked Ms Hoyte with a hammer and left her for dead after a violent argument.

The English model now appears to be the route being planned by the Scottish Government, despite the recommendations for a much tighter non-retrospective law proposed by the Scottish Law Commission.

Ministers in Scotland appear to be satisfied that the English law has not been over used by prosecutors south of the Border and has usually been successful when applied.