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Meeting of the Parliament 13 June 2012

13 Jun 2012 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Victims and Witnesses (Improving Services)

McDonald, Mark SNP North East Scotland Watch on SPTV

On Annabel Goldie’s comment, my understanding of “Strike it Lucky” is that participants had to avoid hitting hot spots.

The Scottish Government, in introducing the bill, has recognised that although a great distance has been travelled in relation to the role of victims and witnesses and how the justice system operates in relation to them, the journey is not yet complete and there is still work to be done.

I was interested by an article that was recently published in The Guardian, which commented on an Institute of Public Policy Research report that suggested that

“Police forces should develop crime-tracking applications”

to allow individuals to

“follow their cases through the system”.

Furthermore,

“The IPPR found that not knowing about what was happening in a case was a key cause of frustration for victims and undermined their confidence in the criminal justice system.”

I was struck by how that perhaps complements some of the work that is being done by Victim Support Scotland on case-progress information. It has developed a pilot in Tayside in which

“Victims and witnesses of crime will be supported through, and gain speedier access to, case progress information in an understandable way.”

Those two issues seem to me to be matched quite closely together, so I am interested to hear the Government’s view on that and how the suggestion in the IPPR report might be progressed.

Lewis Macdonald spoke about Peter Morris—I want to focus on that subject for the remainder of my speech. I encountered Mr Morris in the north-east of Scotland, and I was struck by some his testimony as a witness and, by extension, as a victim of the process. I note that one of the Government’s proposed key principles is that

“Victims and witnesses should have access to appropriately tailored support before, during and after proceedings.”

I want to focus much of what I have to say on that because it relates to the matter that Mr Morris was obviously campaigning on. As Lewis Macdonald rightly highlighted, Mr Morris’s sister Claire was murdered in 1994, although the trial was not brought until some 17 years later when new evidence came to light.

I first encountered Mr Morris was when he was trying to reclaim his sister’s grave, and it is worth putting on record the excellent work of the Aberdeen Law Project, which is a student-led clinic that did a huge amount of work to assist Mr Morris in that endeavour.

Mr Morris petitioned the Parliament on victims of crime. His view was very much that, although the perpetrators of crime are delivered sentences, there is also often a silent sentence that is served on those who are the victims of crime and, by extension, on their families.

Mr Morris undertook a walk to Parliament, which unfortunately had a personal cost for him because he was forced to have one of his legs amputated below the knee after it became infected. However, I walked the first 10 miles of that walk with Mr Morris from his sister’s graveside to the village of Newburgh in Aberdeenshire. On the way, we discussed the issues that he was trying to raise. One of the things that he felt was difficult was that there can be gaps in support for victims because of compartmentalisation of the justice process, in that each component of the justice system has its own role. Victims often feel, therefore, that they are being passed like a parcel from organisation to organisation as each organisation’s role closes and another’s begins.

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Meeting of the Parliament 13 June 2012

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