‘Fallible’ system means innocent are jailed, says judge

Innocent people are sometimes jailed for crimes they did not commit, representing an extreme failure of the “fallible” Irish legal system, according to Supreme Court judge Mr Justice Frank Clarke.

It’s important to acknowledge the miscarriages of jus- tice when they occur and learn from the system’s failures, he said yesterday at an international conference on wrongful conviction and human rights.

“I think all systems need to acknowledge they are fallible,” Mr Justice Clarke said.

“They are fallible for all sorts of reasons. They may be fallible due to human mistake. Judges are, after all, human beings, though not everyone seems to agree with that proposition, but they are human beings, they do make mistakes,” he said.

“Systems have their own failures and get things wrong. And of course, on occasion, people may be up to no good. There may be true miscarriages of justice in the sense of a deliberate wrongdoing on the part of either witnesses or investigating authorities which is not found out in the course of the trial process and which leads to a wrongful conviction.”

Dubliner Peter Pringle and his wife Sonia ‘Sunny’ Jacobs had both been sentenced to death for murders, but later cleared. Mr Pringle spent 15 years in prison in Portlaoise when convicted of committing a robbery in which two gardaí lost their lives.

Ms Jacobs was on death row in the US for 17 years, after being convicted of killing two police officers in Florida.

Now living in Galway, they met at an Amnesty International event while speaking out against the death penalty.

“People often ask me what it’s like to get back into society and I say you don’t get back in. The society I was in was gone when I got out, so you have to go in anew,” Mr Pringle said. “The tendency is to withdraw within oneself, retire from conversation, isolate and feel very alienated.”

Mr Pringle said that while there are systems and supports for people who have committed crimes and served their time, there are none for people wrongly convicted.

“I was released. I had no money, no job, no place to stay, no driving licence, no passport. I didn’t even have a social security number.”

Meanwhile, Irish schoolteacher Julie Marku is fighting to get her husband Mark released after he was jailed for 18 years for armed robberies and car thefts. It has been proved he was not been in Greece when the offences occurred.