Miscarriages of Justice
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been wrongfully convicted of a crime in the last ten years.
Answered by Alex Davies-Jones
We have interpreted this question as relating to successful appeals against verdicts, heard at the Crown Court and the Court of Appeal.
The Ministry of Justice publishes quarterly data on successful appeals against magistrates’ courts verdicts heard at the Crown Court in the Criminal Courts Statistics release. Data started being published from 2016. As a result, the dataset covers the past nine years. This can be found in column E of Table_C11 in the statistical tables: Criminal court statistics - GOV.UK.
Figures for the number of successful appeals against convictions in the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) are published annually in the Royal Courts of Justice tables within Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly. This can be found in column B of table 2.2: Royal_Courts_of_Justice_Annual_Tables_2024.ods.
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