PROFESSOR CLIVE WALKER

17 DECEMBER 2007

  Q20  Lord Dubs: One of the safeguards you have mentioned was that the period of post-charge questioning should be limited to, say, seven days. In your view, given that the period after charge and before trial can be a long one, could that seven days be anywhere within that period, or is there some additional safeguard you would attach to it? In other words, could the police wait, say, three months and then have their seven days?

  Professor Walker: I have raised the question before whether the police are allowed to wait until the day before the trial, and I think we have to judge in the circumstances whether they have done so as a kind of artifice to put pressure on the suspect, in other words on the accused, by waiting that long. But I am troubled by the idea and I started with the proposition: Well, why do we not allow them another 28 days, and then I had the question would it be 28 days per each piece of new evidence, or 28 days overall? It did seem to me we were getting into the realms of very oppressive-looking treatment. So my suggestion is that the period should be seven days, seven days in detention of the police for questioning, and that this should be treated as a clock that you could start and stop within that seven days. You start when you think it is a reasonable point to start it; you may stop after three days and save the other four days for later. I do mention seven days; you may think nowadays that is awfully short given that we have 28 days, but I think it is a fair period. Remember that 28 days was set with a view to dealing with things like forensic evidence and connecting with foreign police forces, reading computers, looking at CCTV; 28 days was not set to interrogate the suspect for 28 days. I can also tell you that if the seven days is purely for interrogating the suspect, that is an extraordinarily long period of interrogation. Maybe I have been too generous there. I did some research and when the period of detention used to be seven days—which it was, of course, until 2003—a study by the Home Office in 1992 found that out of seven days the maximum period of questioning of any suspect that it ever came across was 21 hours. So if one takes seven days as the questioning period, with maybe a little bit of time to get the person meals and so on in between, then that is an extraordinarily generous amount of time to allow to the police purely for questioning.

  Q21  Chairman: And this would also, in your view, be subject to approval by a judge in the first place?

  Professor Walker: Indeed, yes. The balance of questioning, as we have said, should be with a purpose which is explained to the judge, and I suppose equally the judge should check on where the clock has reached and make sure that the time is not being exceeded.

  Chairman: That would fit in very well with one of our recommendations in an earlier report about much more judicial management of the timetable in relation to terrorist cases.

  Earl of Onslow: One other matter arises out of that point—

  Chairman: This is your post-interview questioning!

  Q22  Earl of Onslow: —which is the police getting hold of evidence, holding it and saying: "We will wait before until a week before the trial", even though this is new evidence, new evidence you have had for six months. Presumably this would have to be controlled by the judge as well?

  Professor Walker: Yes. We are reliant on the judge, and your own previous reports have shown that perhaps the judges are not active enough in these cases and should be encouraged to be more active in questioning the police. So, yes, I would very much encourage a judge to question: When did this evidence become available to you? Why have you waited six months to ask for questioning at this point?

  Chairman: Thank you very much, that is very helpful, and I hope has answered one or two questions in our minds about questioning witnesses in this area.