21/02/2023
Police Oracle
It examines a dataset of over 5.6 million charges and all 68,863 jury verdicts by deliberation on rape charges over a 15-year period.
New research, published today in the Criminal Law Review, provides the first detailed analysis of all charges, pleas and outcomes in rape and other sexual offences in England and Wales from 2007 through 2021.
The research was carried out by Cheryl Thomas KC (hon), professor of judicial studies at University College London, acknowledged to be the UK’s leading academic expert on juries.
Headline findings
The research reveals that, contrary to popular belief, juries are more likely to convict than acquit defendants on rape charges. It also shows that this has been the case for the last 15 years, that the jury conviction rate for rape and all sexual offences has steadily increased over this time period and this is true for all nature of rape offences in England and Wales.
The analysis also shows that the precipitous fall in rape charging from 2018 was part of a systemic fall in all charging in this period; that rape offences have the highest not guilty plea rate of any offence; and that juries are not always more reluctant to convict young men for rape than older men.
Professor Thomas argues, quite rightly, that these findings have important implications not just for the Government’s End to End Rape Review Action Plan and the current Law Commission review of sexual offence prosecutions. Knowing the truth about jury decision-making in rape cases is important for all rape victims who may be reluctant to pursue their case through to trial because they wrongly believe that juries are unwilling to convict in rape cases.
Before we look at the detail of the research, it is important to be clear that there is still a big problem in how we deal with rape in this country. While Professor Thomas compares fluctuations in the number of Crown Court charges for sexual offences and other offences, her analysis is focused only on the Court stage of the process. We know that the majority of allegations of rape never get as far as the Crown Court. The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee last year showed that in 2019/20 just 3% of reported rape offences ended up in a perpetrator being charged or summonsed (with the outcome as yet unknown in 12% cases).
The research
Professor Thomas provides a very helpful disentanglement of the confusion over rape conviction rates, describing four different ways of calculating these. Concerns in the media are often based on the attrition rate which calculates a rape conviction rate as the proportion of rape complaints made to the police that end in conviction (whether by guilty plea or jury verdict). Professor Thomas’ work focuses on the conviction rate at court cases where the jury deliberates and reaches a verdict of guilty on a specific rape charge.
This research is doubly important because of the very high rate of not-guilty pleas in rape cases – 85% over the fifteen year period, far higher than for all other offence types. The next highest not guilty plea rate after rape is for homicide-related offences (68%). The not guilty plea rate for rape offences is also far higher than the not guilty plea rate for sexual offences in general, which at 44% is almost half the not guilty plea rate for rape offences.
The research found that, with the exception of 2014, the jury conviction rate for rape offences has been over 50% in every year in the 15-year period of 2007–21. This means that juries are more likely to convict than acquit defendants on rape charges, and this has consistently been the case for the last 15 years. There has been a noticeable change since 2017. In the eleven years from 2007-2017, the average conviction rate was 52.7%, in the four years from 2018-2021, that rate has jumped to 72.4%.