Okay…

1. I wouldn’t call that a blog, as there’s no comments.

2. No info on the split between guilty pleas and convictions by jury.

3. Doesn’t indicate whether this figure is solely for rape prosecutions ending in a conviction for rape.

So, its a bit of reassurance PR that adds very little to the actual debate.

Something cim pointed out to me some time ago – which to my shame hadn’t previously occurred to me – is that if the CPS only prosecute cases they think they have a reasonable chance of winning, or more likely than not, or say 51% chance of success, you’d expect a split along those lines in terms of convictions and acquittals after going to court (approximately 50-50, say).

That’s another reason why context is so important.

Oh, and as I’m in a pedantic mood today, a charge is not the same as a prosecution.

A suspect may be charged only to have the charges dropped before the CPS obtains a guilty plea or gets the case to court if, for example, the complainant backs out before trial, leaving the CPs without a viable case to prosecute.

Cases where this happens don’t, IIRC, count towards the prosecution/conviction stats nor, indeed, do cases in which a suspect is initally charged with rape but then cops to a lesser sexual assault offence in return for the CPS dropping the rape charge.

UKL:

IIRC, the success rate in contested rape cases is generally lower than 50%.

The last figures I recall seeing put the jury conviction rate for England and Wales at around 40%, with Scotland recording a lower figure of around 33%, although that didn’t, I think, provide any data on the split between ‘not guilty’ and ‘not proven’ verdicts.

What makes up the numbers are the guilty pleas – a sizeable number of offenders do hold out in the hope/belief that their case may not reach court only to roll over when it become the clear that the CPS intend to take the case all the way if necessary.

From what I understand, the game-changer is often the point at which the CPS have to disclose their evidence to the defence, which is the point at which the suspect finds out whether the CPS has anything more to put on the table than the testimony of the complainant.

“conviction rates had gone up to nearly 60%… this is a rise of just under 5% since 2006-7.”

These figures just don’t mean much by themselves. The CPS could probably achieve a conviction rate of close to 100% if they chose only to prosecute cases in which the alleged rapist had confessed, but that would not be good news for victims. It woud mean most victims were less likely, not more likely, to see their attacker convicted.

We need to know *why* the conviction rate has gone up. Is it just that the CPS have got more demanding as regards which cases are ‘worth’ pursuing? (They used to prosecute cases with a 55% chance of success, but now it’s cases with a 60% chance?) Or is a rape case in 2011 actually more likely to result in a conviction than a *comparable* case was in 2006?

http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/statistics-and-data/criminal-justice/criminal-justice-statistics.htm (2010) and http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/criminalannual.htm (2009) might give a bit more information.

Table 3.16 (Court proceedings table) says that in 2010, 22% of defendants made a guilty plea of rape, and 35% of those who did not were convicted of rape, which adds up to about 49% of all defendants being convicted.

Same calculation for all sexual offences gives a 60% conviction rate.

I would guess from that they’re counting “convictions for anything:prosecutions for rape” or less likely “convictions:prosecutions for sexual offences” as their ratio.

G.O./5: Is it just that the CPS have got more demanding as regards which cases are ‘worth’ pursuing?

Table 3.15 is also worth a look: the CPS chances for conviction where the suspect pleads not guilty are about 1 in 3 for almost all categories of offence – but the proportion of suspects pleading guilty is much much lower for sexual offences than any other category.

Table 4.15 has a fairly noticeable rise – especially over the entire decade – of the number of convictions for rape (but what was going on in the 35 cases where an offender was cautioned?!). Unfortunately, looking at the police stats for reported crime (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1210/?view=Standard&pubID=865264 – table 2.04) it looks like the number of reports of rape has also been rising noticeably too.

Getting the real conviction:report ratio out of that is impossible without a proper longitudinal study, because Home Office and Justice data are not particularly compatible, but at a rough glance it does look marginally better than it did in 2003 – around 7.5% rather than around 6% (looking back further wouldn’t really be comparable because the definition of the offence was changed then)

5. G.O. – “We need to know *why* the conviction rate has gone up. Is it just that the CPS have got more demanding as regards which cases are ‘worth’ pursuing? (They used to prosecute cases with a 55% chance of success, but now it’s cases with a 60% chance?) Or is a rape case in 2011 actually more likely to result in a conviction than a *comparable* case was in 2006?”

There is another option and that is the procedural safeguards around criminal trials are being weakened to the point that it is much easier to convict people of rape. If you take away the defendants’ rights it is much easier to convict after all.

I suspect it is a little of all of these.