The Right to Access to a Lawyer at Police Stations: Making the European Union Directive Work in Practice
Recent EU Directives provide for a range of procedural protections for suspects and accused persons, going beyond the more broadly articulated standards set out in the European Convention of Human Rights. These reforms are to be welcomed, but their implementation poses a range of challenges for Member States. Drawing on recent empirical research, this article focuses on one measure, the right to legal assistance during police custody. It discusses the range of complex and often inter-related factors that operate to help or to hinder the process of ensuring that the right is ‘practical and effective’ and not merely ‘theoretical and illusory’. Member States do not share a common procedural tradition and alongside ensuring sufficient financial and human resources, effective implementation will require shifts in the legal and occupational cultures of police, prosecutors and the criminal bar.
Bridewell Legal Advice Study: adopting a 'whole-systems' appraoch to police station legal advice
The Bridewell Legal Advice Study was intended to improve access to legal advice by basing duty solicitors in a large city centre police station. Implications for legal advice, for changing relations between the police and the defence, and in improving the pre-charge process were examined. The study examines issues concerning the take-up of legal advice, duration and case outcomes, as well as police disclosure and the quality of pre-charge decision-making. Also highlighted were issues concerning positive policing practices and implciations for using police custody as a form of social control.
The Police, the Prosecutor and the Juge D’Instruction Judicial Supervision in France, Theory and Practice
The judicial supervision of police investigations is attractive to many as a possible corrective to the police tendency to focus prematurely upon one suspect, overlooking or suppressing important evidence. Based upon her own empirical study of French pre-trial justice, the author argues that direct involvement of the superviser in the investigation is anticipated neither by the text of the law, nor the legal actors themselves. Drawing on observation, interviews and questionnaires, the importance of occupational cultures in understanding the daily practices of legal personnel is examined. In particular, attention is paid to the nature of the relationship between police and superviser and to the ways in which the superviser’s status as ‘magistrat’ is employed as a legitimating ideology permeating all aspects of pre-trial justice.