Lifting the Lid of the Single Justice Procedure [R]

Tristan Kirk has spent the last six years digging into the Single Justice Procedure, a secretive court process where hundreds of thousands of people are convicted each year in private hearings.

The process was invented to cut costs and fast-track justice, but with few safeguards on the quality of the justice administered or the transparency of decision-making. His investigation has uncovered disabled people, the elderly, the sick, and the vulnerable being treated harshly in a court system aimed at speed rather than fairness.

Tristan will talk about the difficulties of finding out information from the Single Justice Procedure, the ways that criminal justice has changed to take vast amounts of public information into private computer systems, and the techniques that can be deployed to open up justice in the future.

Tristan won the 2024 Paul Foot Award for this investigation.