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John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
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Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
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Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
this isn't the story of one legal case. It's about what happens if the system itself makes mistakes. In Britain, a guilty verdict carries enormous weight. It's meant to be final, but history tells us it's not always final. What if the system gets it wrong? For the people trapped inside that verdict, the road back can be painfully slow, sometimes impossible. In this episode, I'm looking beyond the headlines to the machinery of British justice. The appeal courts, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates cases where there are doubts. And the culture that makes it so hard to admit error. To help make sense of it, I spoke to John Robbins, a journalist who spent years reporting on miscarriages of justice in the uk. He's talked to families, lawyers, campaigners. He knows the process and the points where it breaks. I'm Amanda Knox and from Vespucci and iheart podcasts, this is the case of Lucy letby. Bonus Episode 2 the Long Road to Justice. For people who haven't witnessed or had experience of the British justice system, let's start with what happens after a conviction and why the path to correcting a mistake feels so narrow.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
So if you are an innocent person, wrongly convicted, and you're kind of sitting in prison and you're rotting in prison, basically your one chance of freedom, your one shot is to write an application to this Birmingham based organisation called the Criminal Cases Review Commission. And if they think you've got a good case, they have the power to refer your case back to the Court of Appeal and the Court of Appeal has the power to overturn it. And it's just for American listeners and for listeners outside of the uk, it will seem a bit bonkers because actually one of the reasons why the Criminal Cases Review Commission was set up in the first place was because of all these miscarriages, just as we saw in the 70s and the 80s and, and really the idea was the courts just never got to grips with these difficult cases. So we'll introduce this brilliant miscarriage of justice watchdog body. So if the problem is the courts, then that is a difficulty.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
In the us, I've seen the same pattern. Once you're convicted, the machinery of justice isn't built to look backward. Appeal courts don't ask, did we get the truth? They ask, did we follow the rules. Across this episode, I'm asking John to break down the structure, how appeals work, the culture, why institutions resist changing their minds, and the human cost, what this does to people and families. You're going to hear a few phrases that matter. One is first, fresh evidence. Another is an atomistic approach. Together, they shape what gets back before judges and what doesn't. Let's start with the nuts and bolts. If someone is convicted and says the court got it wrong, the presumption of innocence then flips. In other words, the system treats the conviction as fact and it's up to the convicted person to prove a miscarriage of justice. But how do you prove a negative?
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
Well, you can have all the support and public will and media coverage that you want. Whether you're going to hit the legal threshold is a totally different matter. But, yes, proving a negative, absolutely. What a nightmare. Especially in this scenario. The legalistic nature of our courts, you need fresh evidence, and that fresh evidence must be enough to undermine the safety of the conviction. And the history of miscarriages, just as recently is the courts can take a very narrow view on that. Legal scholars will kind of talk about an atomistic approach where they just look narrowly at what is before them, the new evidence that's before them, and they don't look at everything else that everyone else might be talking about.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
In theory, that sounds reasonable. You get a fair trial, and if something goes wrong, you can appeal. In practice, that appeal is incredibly hard to win. Appeal courts don't retry cases. They only look for mistakes in law or procedure and for new evidence that wasn't available the first time around. In the us, Appellate courts are just as reluctant. The Innocence Project has shown that most successful exonerations come from new DNA evidence. That's because it's almost the only kind of proof they'll accept. Anything else, even confessions from real perpetrators, can be dismissed as not new enough. Judging whether evidence is new enough is the responsibility of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the ccrc. It's the body that decides whether a case is strong enough to send back to the Court of Appeal. It's supposed to be the safety net, but as John explains, it's a net with large holes
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
to kind of further layer on complexities. You only will get your case sent back to the Court of Appeal if the Criminal Cases Review Commission believes you have a reasonable possibility of your conviction being overturned. Which means the ccrc, the watchdog body, has to second guess the Court of Appeal. The real problem here is if you get a more conservative Court of Appeal. Then increasingly the CCRC becomes a more conservative body. And that's what we've seen over the last years. The CCRC has pretty much ground to a halt.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
It means the CCRC can't simply act on doubt. They have to predict how the same court that upheld the original verdict is likely to respond a second time. And so the cases most in need of review, the complex contested ones, often never get that chance. But how did this justice watchdog end up with this built in restraint?
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
The CCRC was set up after a series of miscarriages, justice. The most kind of famous one was the Birmingham Six. So six kind of innocent Irish Ben wrongly convicted of an IRA bombing campaign in the 1970s. And there were a run of these cases, the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven, known as the Irish cases. And then there were other cases as well. And the system lost public confidence to such a degree that there was a Royal Commission and the main recommendation was to set up the CCRC. CCRC came into being in 1997. Miscarriages of justice has kind of moved as an issue that politicians kind of cut their teeth on and made their careers through in the 70s and the 80s and felt very strongly about. And an issue that really motivated the public. But for some reason, and I'm not quite sure why this reason would be, the politicians moved on, the media moved on as well. The CCRC has been. The problems are complex. It's been starved of funds for years, you know, for over a decade it's been kind of neutered by the courts making criticism, the commission, and it's been let down by its own leadership as well. And there's lots of concerns about the way the organisation has handled itself. But I think the serious issue is it's been undermined, underfunded, but it's also seemingly run by people who haven't really kind of grasped the challenge of the Commission, who aren't prepared to fight against injustice, who aren't prepared to kind of expose these cases. And it's become this defanged watchdog.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
Some argue that the very organization created to stop injustice now hesitates to challenge it. Even strong cases can stall because they don't fit the narrow definition of fresh evidence.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
They don't look at the new narrative, they just look at that new piece of fresh evidence. And if that's not enough to undermine the conviction, then the conviction remains in place. We've seen, you know, frankly, very odd examples. I mean, I've written about cases where the whole prosecution case has been entirely I would argue undermined. And yet a conviction has been upheld on the most narrowest reason. And what you get is the Court of Appeal clinging on to the fiction of a man's guilt. And the rest of the world has moved on and said he was innocent. From this atomistic approach, is this new piece of evidence enough to undermine the conviction? No, it's not. The conviction stays. We're not going to listen to all that stuff that you're talking about in the media that you're excited about. We're going to take this narrow, atomistic approach.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
This narrow view of fresh evidence invites a paradox of finality, the idea that stability matters more than truth. Once a verdict is entered, the legal machine resists undoing it, no matter how shaky the foundation. And when the commission does refer a case, the Court of Appeal can still reject it, sometimes on the same grounds that caused the CCRC to hesitate in the first place. This means that very few people actually succeed in overturning their convictions.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
1500 people apply to the CCRC asking for their case to be looked at again. A few Years ago, just 12 people got their case sent back to the Court of Appeal and then a couple of years after that, just 13. So less than 1% get their cases sent back. And then of course, the Court of Appeal doesn't overturn every one of them. The success rate of the CCRC is about 70%.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
In this system, certainty is prized above correction. It protects the idea that the courts are almost always right. And for the few who are wronged, the path to proving it is long, lonely and stacked against them. That's something I recognize deeply. There's a special kind of isolation that comes from knowing you're right but having no one in power willing to believe you. But it isn't just the structure that makes justice so hard to reach. It's also the mindset. Next, John explains why British justice struggles not just with procedure, but with pride.
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Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
Journalist and justice expert John Robbins says the biggest obstacle to overturning wrongful convictions in Britain isn't always the law itself. It's the people enforcing it and the deep instinct within the system to defend itself.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
So if we kind of go back to the bad old days when there were these miscarriages of justice in the 1970s and 1980s, that the main one being the Birmingham Six case, the judge that every law student would know, Lord Denning and the most well known judge in our lifetime, said he got a very famous quote, but he said, if these men were telling the truth, in other words, if these six innocent Irish men were telling the truth and they were not IRA bombers, it would be such. The quote is such an appalling vista, such an appalling prospect, because it meant that the police would be lying, that the police would have beaten these people up, et cetera. The police did lie, they did beat confessions out of them, and they were convicted on dodgy evidence. Denning's point was it's better that these people are convicted and stay in prison than they're let out, because if they're let out, that will undermine the integrity of the justice system.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
Once a jury's verdict is in, every other part of the process tends to reinforce it. Appeal judges defer to trial judges, the CCRC defers to the court of appeal. And at the end of that chain, the convicted person is left shouting into the wind. The presumption of guilt after conviction could describe almost any justice system I've encountered. Once you're labeled guilty, the system assumes there was a good reason for the conviction, and so the burden of proof shifts. This assumption can be traced back to the initial trial, which is fought in an adversarial system.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
The adversarial system is this competitive theatrical. One side, two different narratives competing in the minds of the jury. And that can easily, as you can imagine, distort a version of events. And when you get the conviction happens, then suddenly the prosecution narrative becomes the dominant narrative which the media report on. So any kind of nuance, any kind of inaccuracies are sealed forever in the trial.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
In other words, the system prizes finality, not because it's efficient, but because it protects authority and the closure that a verdict offers the victims and their families. It keeps the story neat, someone did it, case closed. But protecting that finality comes at the cost of the truth. You may have heard the term quality control used in business and manufacturing, car companies, app developers, online marketplaces. They all employ regular QC measures to ensure customer satisfaction and safety. The assembly line should be checked at some regular interval to ensure there aren't defects that might cause harm. The presumption in such cases is that there are inevitably errors, hopefully few, but they won't be corrected unless you go looking for them. That is why in the us, Conviction integrity units exist. But they are often small, underfunded and politically risky. It's hard to tell your own colleagues that they ruined someone's life, even when the evidence demands it.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
It's a political problem. It's a complicated problem, is what it is. It's a cultural problem as well. It's a multi dimensional problem. Yes, it is political. Its successive governments have failed to recognize the importance of what is an absolutely essential safety net part of the justice system. That's a political problem. It's being underfunded, but also the wrong people are being put in to kind of lead the commission. You can always find ways not to overturn convictions. You can always find ways to keep innocent people in prison because the cases are never particularly black and white, they're always kind of gray areas. And if you're kind of looking for a reason not to do anything, you'll find that reason. And that's one of the things that's gone wrong with the commission.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
And that's where John's own reporting often begins, in the gap between what the law says is possible and what fairness demands. He talks about visiting families who've spent decades fighting to prove a loved one's innocence. By then, the battle isn't just legal, it's psychological.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
It's devastating. There are thousands of people whose loved ones are in prison who have applied to the commission and they're just going nowhere. And it's heartbreaking. These people are just stuck in this kind of limbo, period.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
But outside that system, beyond the courts and commissions, there's another force that can change how these stories are the public and the media. Behind every legal case, there's a person, and usually a family, living with the fallout for them. A wrongful conviction isn't an abstract problem in the justice system. It's a sentence that doesn't end when the prison doors open. Even exoneration can feel hollow. The public rarely hears that part of the story. How difficult it is to rebuild or how reluctant the state is to make amends. In the us, exonerees face that too. There's no automatic compensation in most states. You often have to sue, which can be difficult. And even when compensation is available, it's often very limited. That's not to mention the reputational stain. For me, even 10 years after my exoneration, many people around the world continue to doubt my innocence. And in England, exonerees have to prove their innocence to get payment. The overturning of their conviction is not enough. People have lost decades of their lives and then been left with nothing to help rebuild. There's a quiet cruelty in that logic. If the court's got it wrong, the least the system could do is help people start again. Instead, many are left to crowdfund their recovery while officials protect the myth that justice never falters. But sometimes those myths crack, not because the courts reopen a case, but because the public takes an interest.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
The media can be, you know, kind of for the wrongly convicted. It is the lifeline. You know, there is no kind of wrongful exoneration that I know of that hasn't involved an engaged media pushing at the doors of the courts. But problem is, the media's for some reason, has become increasingly disengaged, and we've definitely suffered from that on this side of the Atlantic. I don't know if that's true for you, but that's our experience. You just need the attention of the media, the relentless attention of the press to make any kind of change. The irony is the ccrc, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the Discouragement of Justice Watchdog, will say, we will not respond to media campaigns. Quite right. You know, just because someone is sympathetic to the media, why should their case be treated any differently? But you absolutely do need the engagement of the media to make any difference here, really do.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
On the flip side, the headlines that helped convict someone can make exoneration almost impossible. Once a story becomes a national obsession, it's hard for new evidence to compete with what people think they already know. I dealt with this firsthand. Once a narrative like the Angel Faced Killer takes hold, changing that story is like trying to stop an avalanche halfway down the mountain.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
There will have been journalists who sat through the Lucy Letby trial. There are journalists who sat through trials that I've written about quite recently. And what happens is when someone is convicted, that becomes the truth. That becomes the biblical truth, the only narrative. And in an adversarial justice system, as I described, where you get a prosecution narrative versus a defense narrative and you don't get that kind of commitment to pursuing the truth necessarily, it's very, very dangerous. It does worry me that the media is uncritical when it kind of sits through the trials or else there's a responsibility, isn't there, to the media to pick up afterwards. But what we saw with the Lucy Letby conviction, it seems to me, was a very fixed narrative. And that's very, very hard to shift. It is shifting, I think, but it's very hard to shift.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
When the public pays attention, things can shift. In Britain, that happened with the Post Office scandal, a massive miscarriage of justice that saw hundreds of postal workers wrongly convicted after a computer system falsely accused them of theft. It took years of reporting, protest and public anger to put it right. Stories like that remind us that justice doesn't always start in courtrooms. It often begins with ordinary people who refuse to be silent. But what would it take to make those stories less rare and the system less defensive?
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Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
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Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
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John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
Well, I think journalists have got to find their own position on it, but I do think they need to be more open minded about cases being miscarriages of justice and more critical thinking. The idea that journalists sat through this trial and they were there and if she is innocent, then it does raise questions about kind of challenging these narratives that we talked about. I think the Letby case is really interesting because it kind of potentially shows the worst and best of journalism. Journalists are there in a formal sense to deliver open justice and make sure that justice is done. They're there in court, you know, they're there by proxy to represent the people. That's one of the ideas that we have in the uk, this notion, a firm sense of open justice hugely challenged by the massive decrease of interest on behalf of the media for these cases. I mean, one of the issues that we have is that media organizations, newspapers, broadcasters just don't have the money to have people sitting in court these days in England.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
A right to appeal sounds like a simple idea, but it would mean a fundamental change in mindset. Instead of treating appeals as rare exceptions, they'd become a part of how the system keeps itself honest. Not every system has this fault. In Italy, for instance, appeals are guaranteed. It's one of the few things about my experience with their justice system that was better than it would have been in England or the us. In the us, there's technically a right to appeal, but it's limited, especially after the first round. Habeas corpus petitions are supposed to be a safeguard, but they're narrow and procedural once you're convicted. The law values closure over correction. That's what England and America share. But John says he sees signs of change, particularly in the case of Lucy Letby.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
It kind of feels that the media is really re engaging in a way that it hasn't done since the bad old days of those terrible cases like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. People are outraged and of course, they get attacked by the legal establishment. And it's been very interesting to see the legal establishment or representatives, the legal establishment, speaking out about their concerns as well, which I think is kind of unprecedented. Former Supreme Court judge has spoken out about concerns about the Letby case. We've had conservative former government ministers talking out about it as well. That comes from that engaged media that I was describing before that, you know, it creates that support for the campaign.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
There's a humility in that. The idea that justice isn't perfect and doesn't need to be. It just needs to be honest enough to correct itself. John says he's learned something over years of reporting these cases, that just justice isn't only about courts and commissions. It's about the collective will to keep asking questions.
John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
What we kind of need, I think, in our day and age, is a justice system that has a bit more humility. I think we can all take it. The idea that mistakes are made, that they are recognized and they're done efficiently and swiftly. I think that's what people would expect from the justice system.
Amanda Knox (Podcast Host and Narrator)
We're going to take a short break for now, but it's for a good reason. I'm actually in the uk. I've been meeting with people directly connected to the case and having some incredible conversations that I can't wait to share with you. So stay with us for the next episodes of the Case of Lucy Letby. Doubt the Case of Lucy Letby is brought to you by Vespucci Iheart Podcasts and Knox Robinson Productions. I've been your host, Amanda Knox. This episode was written by Joe Meek. The co producer was Lucy Ditchmont. The assistant producer was Ami Gill. Senior producer is Natalia Rodriguez. The sound designer is Tom Biddle. The theme music was written by Tom Biddle Story editing by Kathleen Goldhar. Legal advice was provided by Jack Browning. The producers at iHeart Podcasts are Chandler Mays and Katrina Norville. The executive producers were Joe Meek, Amanda Knox, Christopher Robinson, Daniel Turkin and Johnny Galvin. Thank you for listening.
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John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
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Host: Amanda Knox
Guest: John Robbins (Journalist and Justice Expert)
Date: May 12, 2026
In this bonus episode, Amanda Knox explores the deep-rooted challenges of correcting wrongful convictions within the UK justice system, taking the infamous case of Lucy Letby as a focus and examining the broader structural, cultural, and psychological obstacles. Through in-depth discussion with journalist John Robbins, the episode interrogates the workings and failings of institutions like the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the enduring cost for those wrongfully convicted, and the vital—but precarious—role of media and public pressure.
Amanda Knox opens with a reflection on the finality and weight of guilty verdicts in Britain and the machinery set up to correct potential miscarriages of justice ([02:38]):
The conversation is anchored in what happens after conviction and how narrow the road to exoneration can be ([04:17]).
Robbins describes the post-conviction landscape for those maintaining innocence ([04:17]):
The CCRC's role—set up as a miscarriage of justice watchdog after scandals like the Birmingham Six ([09:19]):
Systemic conservatism: As appellate courts grow more cautious, so too does the CCRC ([08:13]):
The justice system prioritizes stability over truth ([12:08]):
Extremely low success rate: Out of roughly 1,500 annual applications to the CCRC, often only a handful are even referred back, and fewer still result in overturned convictions:
Effect on individuals and families: The "special kind of isolation" and persistent struggle to prove innocence or rebuild after exoneration ([13:11], [21:31]):
The system resists correction out of institutional pride:
Political and leadership failures: The CCRC is underfunded, led by risk-averse managers, and retreats further under political pressure ([10:00], [20:50]):
Media: both lifeline and hazard
But also shapes national perception:
Media neglect: Underfunding means fewer reporters in court, less critical scrutiny, and entrenched narratives ([30:08]):
Amanda calls for a mindset shift: Appeals should not be exceptional, but a part of a system’s regular self-correction ([31:06]):
Comparative note: In Italy, appeals are guaranteed as a matter of course ([31:40]).
Signs of hope: The Letby case has reignited media and establishment scrutiny, with rare public comments from senior judges and officials questioning the system ([32:09]):
What is needed: More humility, willingness to admit error, and relentless questioning from public and media ([33:20]):
"[The] system treats the conviction as fact and it's up to the convicted person to prove a miscarriage of justice. But how do you prove a negative?" — Amanda Knox ([05:05])
"Proving a negative, absolutely. What a nightmare. Especially in this scenario. The legalistic nature of our courts, you need fresh evidence..." — John Robbins ([06:19])
"What you get is the Court of Appeal clinging on to the fiction of a man's guilt. And the rest of the world has moved on and said he was innocent." — John Robbins ([11:16])
"Once you're labeled guilty, the system assumes there was a good reason for the conviction, and so the burden of proof shifts." — Amanda Knox ([18:23])
"Justice isn't only about courts and commissions. It's about the collective will to keep asking questions." — Amanda Knox ([32:54])
This episode compellingly argues that the British (and, in parallel, American) justice system's ostensible tools for error correction are deeply flawed—hamstrung by restrictive definitions of evidence, institutional pride, political neglect, and a culture that equates certainty with justice. The stories of Lucy Letby, the Birmingham Six, and others testify to a system more committed to defending itself than admitting error. Yet, Amanda Knox and John Robbins also spotlight hope: rising public scrutiny, renewed media involvement, and growing demands for a humbler, truth-seeking justice.
For listeners unfamiliar with the specifics of the Letby case or the UK post-conviction process, this conversation offers a clear, empathetic deconstruction of why justice is so hard to reach—and why refusing to accept a system's supposed infallibility remains an act of both resistance and hope.