Tony Ward

• PhD
• Professor at Northumbria University

Within Nigeria, anti-money laundering and asset recovery powers lie primarily with agencies established under the Corrupt Practices and Related Offences Act 2000, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission Act 2004 and the Advance Fee Fraud and Other Fraud Related Offences Act 2006. International efforts to recover assets associated with serious...

Box’s argument that ‘criminal law categories are ideological constructs’ (Box, Power, crime and mystification, Tavistock, London, 1983, 7) opens up an important space for dialogue between criminology and critical studies of criminal law. In this chapter we apply Box’s insight to a type of criminalization that is much more prominent today than it wa...

This book provides the first comprehensive and detailed analysis of the Infanticide Act and its impact in England and Wales and around the world. It is 100 years since an Infanticide Act was first passed in England and Wales. The statute, re-enacted in 1938, allows for leniency to be given to women who kill their infants within the first year of li...

An important part of the work of forensic scientists is communicating accurate information to lay factfinders under conditions of uncertainty. It is an ethically demanding role as it obliges scientists to disclose information that may call their own authority into question. Similar issues arise in other areas of applied science, for example climate...

Case commentary of the Court of Appeal ruling in R v Brecani [2021] EWCA Crim 731.

This full-day workshop which will be part of the 1st Michele Taruffo Girona Evidence Week, aspires to increase understanding of complex legal issues in the field of expert evidence with a particular focus on the alleged "crisis" of forensic science and its use in the criminal justice system, as identified by several blue-ribbon committee reports. A...

Through a series of judicial decisions and Practice Directions, the English courts have developed a rule that expert evidence must have ‘a sufficiently reliable scientific basis to be admitted’. There is a dearth of case-law as to degree of reliability is ‘sufficient’. This article argues that the test should be interpreted as analogous to one deve...

We argue that legal argumentation, as the subject matter as well as a special subfield of Argumentation Studies (AS), has to be examined by making skilled use of the full panoply of tools such as argumentation and story schemes which are at the forefront of current work in AS. In reviewing the literature, we make explicit our own methodological cho...

State Crime and Civil Activism explores the work of non-government organisations (NGOs) challenging state violence and corruption in six countries - Colombia, Tunisia, Kenya, Turkey, Myanmar and Papua New Guinea. It discusses the motives and methods of activists, and how they document and criticise wrongdoing by governments. It documents the dialec...

This article looks at human trafficking from a perspective influenced by the ‘vulnerability theory’ developed by Martha Fineman and her associates. It draws particularly on empirical studies of human trafficking from Albania to the UK and elsewhere. It suggests that Fineman’s approach needs to be modified to see the state not only as ameliorating v...

A technical report on forensic science in the United Kingdom

I have been invited to comment on the two preceding chapters not as an international lawyer but as someone with an interest in both legal philosophy and state violence. Both chapters discuss a supposed ‘responsibility to democratise’ and its possible basis in, inter alia, Kant's philosophy. I make no claim to being a Kant scholar, but the most natu...

Cases of human trafficking are known to be difficult to prosecute. In this article we identify several issues in the law of evidence that may contribute to these difficulties. We argue for the victims' rights as an important factor in evidential decisions, coupled with an insistence that such rights cannot trump the defendant's right to a fair tria...

This article criticises H. L. Ho’s argument that the exclusion of improperly obtained evidence can best be understood in terms of a ‘political’ rather than ‘epistemic’ conception of the criminal trial. It argues that an epistemic conception of the trial, as an institution primarily concerned with arriving at accurate verdicts on the part of an inde...

In the context of the UK Supreme Court decision in Sienkiewicz v Greif (2011) this article discusses the question whether so-called "naked statistical evidence" can satisfy the civil standard of proof in English law, the "balance of probabilities". It argues that what is required to satisfy the standard is a judicial belief that causation is more l...

Drawing on material from a study of civil society and state crime in six countries, this article reflects on two themes from Chambliss’s work: the debate between state-centred and more pluralistic views of law, and the “dialectical” approach to the analysis of state crime. It argues for a more pluralistic approach to law than Chambliss and Seidman...

This article discusses the concept of epistemic authority in the context of English law relating to expert testimony. It distinguishes between two conceptions of epistemic authority (and epistemic deference), one strong and one weak, and argues that only the weak conception is appropriate in a legal context, or in any other setting where reliance o...

This article considers the admissibility of expert opinions expressed by means of a verbal scale in England and Wales and other common-law jurisdictions, particularly Australia. It questions whether such evidence can be considered “helpful” to a jury and whether it meets the new English guidelines for assessing whether expert evidence is “sufficien...

This commentary updates the paper ‘Excluding evidence (or staying proceedings) to vindicate rights in Irish and English law’ by analysing the recent decision of the Supreme Court of Ireland in DPP v JC. It argues that although the court has relaxed the exclusionary rule in one major respect, it has strengthened it in others, and that Ireland's appr...

An amendment to the Criminal Practice Direction issued by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales lays down guidance for judges to follow in determining whether expert evidence is ‘sufficiently reliable to be admitted’. Although the guidelines are based on those proposed by the Law Commission in 2011, they do not include a definition of ‘suffic...

Available at: http://jpsl.org/files/3114/3258/3847/EnglishDaubert.pdf A test for the admissibility of expert evidence, partly derived from Daubert, has recently been introduced into English criminal law by the unusual mechanism of a Practice Direction. This article compares the Daubert trilogy and the English Practice Direction as responses to the...

The constitutional duty of the Irish state ‘to defend and vindicate the personal rights of the citizen’ is the basis of a strict rule excluding unconstitutionally obtained evidence. Although English courts recognise a similar duty to ‘vindicate human rights and the rule of law’, their powers to exclude evidence or stay proceedings for abuse of proc...

Review of the book by Ian Ward (no relation).

This paper contrasts two ways of seeking ‘reliability through reform’ of the law and practice relating to forensic science evidence. One approach ('paternalism') sets a high threshold for the admissibility of expert evidence, such as the ‘demonstrable reliability’ standard championed in a series of articles by Gary Edmond and colleagues. The second...

This article discusses the use in England and Wales of expert evidence to compare digital images derived from surveillance camera photographs with facial images of a suspect. It argues that while such evidence has serious limitations the courts are right to admit it, but they are wrong to allow juries to convict on the basis of such evidence alone....

The law of evidence and the ethics of expertise are complementary and closely related attempts to define the proper relationship between experts and the courts. The first part of this chapter discusses the admissibility of expert evidence, focusing particularly on an issue of particular relevance to sexual offenses, that of expert evidence of the c...

The Family Courts Information Pilot took a modest step towards open justice in Children Act cases by publishing 161 judgments of the County Courts and Family Proceedings Courts. Combining socio‐legal and philosophical analysis on lines inspired by the work of Habermas, this article examines the epistemology of expert testimony implicit in the judgm...

This article discusses the treatment of deaf-mute defendants in criminal cases from the Middle Ages to the present, focusing on a series of cases between 1830 and 1914. A finding that a defendant was “mute by the visitation of God” originally meant that she or he could be tried despite the absence of a plea, but in the nineteenth century such defen...

Most crimes are also civil wrongs, so allegations of criminal wrongdoing are sometimes tested by civil judges who sit without juries, give reasons for their findings of fact, and reach those findings on the balance of probabilities rather than claiming that they are ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. A finding reached by the narrowest margin of probability...

The discussion of whether psychopaths are morally responsible for their behaviour has long taken place in philosophy, and in recent years this has moved into scientific and psychiatric investigation. This resource discusses this subject from both the philosophical and scientific disciplines, as well as a legal perspective.

This article examines patterns of collective violence in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, focussing particularly on gender-based violence and militia activities. Drawing on the work of Charles Tilly and others, it explores the idea that collective violence follows a ‘logic’ that can be observed in a wide variety of historical and cultural contexts. An...

Press (Cambridge, 2008) hbk, xxxii + 435pp, £65; e-book, $104 This ambitious and impressive study combines philosophical, historical and comparative perspectives on the thorny question of how a court in a civil case can decide which expert witnesses to believe. Dwyer locates herself firmly within the 'rationalist tradition' of evidence scholarship,...

The hearsay provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 have important implications for psychiatric evidence that relies on statements made by a patient (particularly where the patient is the defendant). The ambiguous common law rulings on such evidence have largely been superseded by the Act. Evidence which relies on the statements of a defendant...

The illicit markets in antiquities and timber both involve damage to objects to which many people attach great intrinsic value, which is not reducible to economic value. Harms of this nature pose a problem for criminological theories that focus on empathy or human rights. To understand them we need to investigate the phenomenology of value. The cla...

This article explores the connections between various forms of organized political violence and ostensibly private, non-political violence in post-invasion Iraq, focusing on gender-based violence and the links between militias and organized crime. We argue that, as in other civil wars, much of the violence is ‘dual-purpose’ , simultaneously serving...

The reluctance of English and other common-law criminal courts to admit expert evidence of witness credibility is rooted in two main objections: that such evidence needlessly complicates the jury's task and that it threatens to ‘usurp’ the jury's role. The ‘usurpation’ objection can be understood as referring to a risk that the expert will be accor...

Psychiatry has played an important part in the history of punishment and social control over the last two centuries. It has contributed to shaping particular practices of punishment (Sim, 1990), to the development of ostensibly non-punitive forms of social control (Scull, 1993), and to the discourses and practices by which the boundary between puni...

The decision whether to believe an expert witness raises difficult epistemological and ethical questions for a lay juror or judge. This article examines the English courts` approach to these questions in the light of a series of cases which endorse the test of admissibility formulated in the Australian case o/R v. Bonython. It argues that, if inter...

The author focuses his attention on two schools of legal idealism: the so-called Sheffield School and the discourse ethics school. In order to emphasize the valuable facets of each school, the author analyzes four different points: (1) the claim to correctness as a necessary feature of law, (2) the connection between correctness and validity, (3) t...

A central task for a criminology of state crime is to explain why the cruelty and destructiveness of regimes of terror so often seem to exceed anything required by the rational pursuit of organizational goals. This article explores competing explanations of terror through a case study of the Congo Free State (1885-1908) and argues that ‘excesses’ a...

Angela Cannings's successful appeal against her convictions for murder has revived an old controversy about the competence of juries to evaluate expert evidence. In response to criticisms of the jury system in the wake of a series of controversial poisoning trials, the Victorian jurist J.F. Stephen argued that juries were well equipped to decide on...

Courts in the UK do not apply stringent criteria to the qualifications or methodology of expert witnesses, but the expert must have skill or knowledge that relates to a matter outside the experience of the court. Evidence from security specialists will satisfy this test in some cases. In civil courts, the judges also have a wide discretionary power...

This article uses nineteenth-century cases and medico-legal writings to illustrate three conceptions of the role of the psychiatric expert in criminal trials, as 'observer', 'adviser', or 'authority'. The nineteenth-century courts in England and Scotland predominantly favoured the 'adviser' role, but since 1957 the case-law on diminished responsibi...

The (English) Infanticide Act 1922 created a partial defence to murder for a woman who killed her newly born child while the balance of her mind was disturbed as a result of giving birth. Prior to the Act, psychiatric defences were comparatively rare where the victim was new-born. Only in 1938 was the law extended to cover cases where the mother wa...

This article discusses the principles governing the use of expert evidence in English criminal trials, with particular reference to evidence on the interpretation of video recordings and photographs. Drawing in part on debates in the USA, it argues that English law is inconsistent in its response to the question of how far juries need to be protect...

This is the first volume of an exciting new series, Current Legal Issues, which will be published each spring as a sister volume to Current Legal Problems. The basis for each interdisciplinary volume will be a two-day colloquium held each year by the Faculty of Laws at University College London. This first volume explores the interrelationship of l...

This article draws on historical material about murder trials where insanity was at issue to explore the relationship among law, science and lay knowledge or 'common sense' It treats psychiatry as an example of a kind of expert knowledge which competes with 'common-sense' understandings of the world in a way which many other kinds of forensic scien...