A Feast of Criminal Law

Because of the short Thanksgiving week stateside, it has been a couple of weeks since my last blog post. I want to use this post to catch up on the goings-on here, both Thanksgiving and criminal justice related. Of course, the UK doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, which to the students’ dismay meant no days off. Nevertheless, we hosted 34 UNC students, parents, and friends for a sumptuous Thanksgiving potluck dinner, a little taste of home away from home. If the food had not disappeared so fast, I would post pictures of the eclectic dishes at the feast—from the four turkey crowns we cooked to the North Carolina-style barbecue sandwiches and UK-style sausages wrapped in bacon brought by others. My wife and I had optimistically planned to go away for the weekend but, like many Americans, we were so exhausted that we slept in. Criminal justice class continued uninterrupted. We heard from Louise Hewitt, a faculty member at the University of Greenwich School of Law and co-director of the Innocence Project London, and two of her students, Trudie Amarh and Lidia Stocia (from right to left). The Innocence Project London is a member of the international Innocence Network, based in New York. Like innocence projects in the US, the London Innocence Project investigates claims of wrongful convictions and presents potentially meritorious claims for further review—in the UK to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). If the CCRC finds that the claim has merit, it sends the case back to the appellate court for [...]