Sunday Mirror: STOTTY ON SUNDAY: The scales of injustice

IT is time for a fundamental overhaul of the British judicial system. For decades we have basked in the fond but mistaken belief that it is the best in the world. It isn't...it is appalling and getting worse.

Innocents jailed, crooks walking free, cases manufactured with little or no evidence. Justice is disappearing fast in the face of a useless Crown Prosecution Service, spiv defence lawyers and Ministers cutting corners to satisfy lynch mob politics and bean-counting bureaucrats.

We are paying for more than half a century of complacency, incompetence and the fierce protection of outdated privilege and working practices by lawyers. Court hearings, festooned with the full majesty of the law, are in reality little more than games of Russian Roulette. And some innocents, as was revealed yet again last week, have paid the price with a judicial bullet to the head.

Then there was Trupti Patel. She should never have been charged with the murder of her three babies. There was not a shred of evidence to support the case against her. It was based on the diktat of one - increasingly discredited - doctor that one cot death is a tragedy, two suspicious and three murder.

This same doctor, 70-year-old retired professor Sir Roy Meadow, is being investigated by the General Medical Council over evidence he has given in previous cases. In the trial of solicitor Sally Clark he said the chances of two cot deaths in one family was one in 73 million - nonsense odds, according to the Royal Statistical Society which said they were more like one in 8,500.

In Trupti Patel's trial Meadow's evidence was rubbished by other expert witnesses. In the six years since his retirement genetic research has overtaken his opinion, suggesting a heart rhythm syndrome that runs in families as a probable cause of the deaths.

The CPS claims a "huge" number of experts were consulted and that the decision to prosecute was taken only after a year of painstaking investigation. That cannot be so. The defence had no difficulty in finding an alternative reason for the children's deaths and the jury's retirement for less than 90 minutes after a six-week trial is a contemptuous dismissal of the "painstaking" inquiry.

It is much more likely that Professor Meadow has been paraded in all the cases where mothers have been charged with killing their children because he tells the police and prosecutors what they want to hear. He is also a master at swaying juries - or he was.

So why did the CPS prosecute when it had next to no evidence and no motive? Because the pressure is on to show that hard-pressed and much-criticised social services are vigilant and prepared to act vigorously in the war against child abuse.

Such pressure invariably brings injustice in its wake as the ghost of George Kelly can testify. He was hanged in 1950 for a double murder in Liverpool and finally cleared four days ago. He was fitted up by police in a crime that shocked the nation and, as a result, became the second innocent man to be hanged in less than three weeks, Timothy Evans had died 19 days earlier for killing his wife and baby daughter - murders actually committed by the chief prosecution witness.

The cobbled-together Department of Constitutional Affairs under Lord Falconer will do nothing more than tinker around the edges of this disaster area. Replacing the Law Lords with a Supreme Court isn't going to stop another Trupti Patel debacle. You need wholesale top-to-bottom reform of the police and prosecution process to do that.

Nor will David Blunkett's desperate idea of introducing American- style district prosecutors who are more accountable at local level. Fine - until public opinion demands action, any action. We can't kill poor unfortunates like George Kelly or Timothy Evans any more. But we can destroy the lives of tragic mothers such as Trupti Patel and Sally Clark.

Others like them still languish in jail - more than likely victims of child abuse hysteria. Blunkett's local attorneys, relying as they would on local public opinion for their jobs, will make this worse, not better. Justice must be above politics, prejudice, personal ambition, financial expediency and revenge.

It used to be said that it is better 10 guilty people go free than one innocent suffers. Nowadays the crisis in our justice system is so acute the 10 guilty still go free, but 10 innocents suffer too.