Where are the transcripts?

TL;DR

• We have 20 full sentencing remarks with dozens more being processed, and of course, there are more trials coming up every month

• We do have upcoming news around larger full trial transcripts, but aren’t able to disclose details in full yet. It is good and promising news, and we’ll be sharing it as soon as possible

• Courts are (still) really slow at getting back to us

• We have not received any objections since Robert Jenrick intervened

• We are hopeful for the national inquiry, but still feel this separate work is needed

• We need media/redaction-trained lawyers please!

So, what do you actually have?

We currently have mapped around 90 trials with 385 gang members/convicts. These numbers are a little shaky as some of these trials may have collapsed, and some of them will relate to the same gangs/members as they are often part of several trials as new crimes come to light.

We have currently obtained 20 transcripts of sentencing remarks relating to 55 gang members/convicts, with many more on the way as we’ll outline below.

Why is it taking so long?

We started this campaign at the start of January, after nearly 8 months of putting countless hours in every week, 20 sentencing remark transcripts feels a little low to us too.

A lot of this is because courts are slow, which we’ll expand on below, but we have also been bogged down because:

1. When we started, there was no totally comprehensive centralised list of grooming gangs. We not only needed this list but we also needed this list broken down by trial (with many gangs being tried separately). This meant we had to piece together various news and police reports to make our own list

2. To apply for sentencing remarks you need information like trial dates and court codes. These are often kept on random websites or not at all - which makes filling out the applications a lengthy process

3. This has been a learning process for us, and in a way the courts too. It is not common for campaign groups to bulk request transcripts - this means that we’ve taken on many learnings and adapted our language for applications as we’ve gone along. It also means courts have had to adjust to this new kind of reasoning and to having so many requests at once.

To the last point, it is worth noting that since Jenrick’s intervention on access to grooming gang transcripts (which we cite in our applications), we have had no rejections from any courts. Such interventions and the pressure they carry do have a real-world impact and it is a shame that the SoS for Justice was not able to echo his sentiment in her response; such a statement would have been invaluable to our work.

Separately, many courts are still insanely slow and continue to blank us. We could write several blogs on this at this point but below is perhaps one of the best cases in point:

On the 24th February, we submit applications for 3 sentencing remarks. Weeks later we have no response, so we follow up on the 10th of March, and to be fair to the court they do confirm receipt the next day.

By the 4th June, we’ve received no response from either clerks or the judges - this is frustrating, comparable submissions have been replied to and approved within just 2 weeks. We follow up, acknowledging the court capacity is tight. We also call the court and leave a message in relation to this request.

Two days later, a court clerk replies and says she cannot provide an update and that we need to resubmit the application, despite the application being on the email chain we are using. We resubmit, and are hopeful it will be dealt with quickly, as they say it will be dealt with urgently.

By today (21st July), we still have no response or even an acknowledgement of our resubmission. We attempted to call the court, but the clerk on the phone was not able to deal with our request and said she would just tell the clerk who we had spoken to via email once to respond to us as soon as she could.

We have several courts that have acted like this. Including courts that have only responded once we complained to the MoJ, and some that still have not responded at all. Due to the distribution of grooming gang cases being fairly concentrated regionally, if one court isn’t replying to us, it means that a significant amount of cases can get ‘stuck’. For example, we’re having some trouble with Leeds Crown Court acknowledging us at all, where around 18% of our mapped trials took place.

We have nearly applied for every case we mapped however, early on into applying for transcripts, found that courts are under no obligation to hold records older than 7 years old, and in fact are actually encouraged to delete them under data protection legislation. This is extremely concerning and warrants its own coverage; some of the most important grooming gang trials took place in the early 2010s and now may be lost forever. As we initially had such a large number of cases to apply for, this meant that we prioritised applying for cases from 2017 onwards, despite being aware of many more. However, recently we have had one very old request for a 2015 case to get approval, and now we have its transcript. This has given us some hope for the much older cases and means we are in the process of gathering details for these cases that we initially decided to put off, so that we can apply on the off chance courts haven’t destroyed the records.

Why are you getting sentencing remarks first?

For context, when applying for court transcripts, you can generally fit them into two categories

• Sentencing remarks: this is just the bit at the end of the trial, and on rare occasions, are already accessible. The 2013 Oxford gang sentencing remarks that prompted this work in the first place are an example of this. They’re usually around 5 - 20 pages long. These generally cost anywhere between £18 - £150 in terms of initial quotes.

• Full remarks: this is the whole trial from start to end, as far as we can see no such transcript from any recent trial for any crime has been released, even with redactions. These can be tens of thousands of pages long, and grooming gang trials are especially complicated with multiple defendants and survivors, making them particularly long. These are likely to cost between £5 - £10k.

When we first started this work we exclusively applied for full trial transcripts, all these applications were rejected. In one of these rejections we were told to apply for sentencing remarks instead, our first applications for these were also rejected, including by the same court that directed us to apply.

However once we persevered, we managed to access more and more sentencing remarks in a way we just couldn’t for full trial transcripts, so we decided to prioritise these as they were easier, quicker, and cheaper to get.

It also seemed that having sentencing remarks for all mapped trials would be a good spring board for applying to get those same cases’ full transcripts, so we always saw this as a sort of ‘phase 1 and phase 2’ for the project.

We feel that in terms of requesting access (not publishing) phase 1 will near its end fairly soon and it is now the time to start prioritisng the cases for the more complex phase 2 full transcript applications.

We do have some exciting news to share around full transcript requesting but are keen not to jeprodise this work, so will be holding off on sharing anything else related to this until we’re sure it’s safe and the best time to do so.

Does this even matter now that there’s a national inquiry?

Yes, for three reasons:

1. The inquiry will be slow, possibly taking 3-4 years

2. The inquiry won’t be totally transparent, much of it (often for good reason) will be held and released privately

3. It seems unlikely that the inquiry will look and release direct court proceedings - and will instead focus more on uncovering new information around the conduct of authorities and institutions - this is good but not not a full overlap with our work

We are happy that a national inquiry is going ahead and commend the formidable Baroness Casey for her work. A lot could still go wrong with the inquiry, and we will heavily scrutinise the terms of reference when they are released and the inquiry itself as it unfolds. It seems very unlikely that the inquiry will look to release court transcripts or even really scrutinise them, so we plan on carrying on with our work.

When will you release something?

We have two primary considerations when releasing transcripts: ensuring nothing violates the privacy and safety of survivors and complying with all reporting restrictions; the rules for the latter are done with the former in mind. When we’ve received many transcripts, they have details such as survivor names that obviously need redacting, but also more minor details such as place names, descriptions of housing, car models - that could be ‘jigsawed together’ to identify victims. We’re also keen on not accidentally getting sued by some obscure loophole

To that end, we are going through quite lengthy, complex, and expensive conversations with several lawyers who will redact the necessary details for us. This is going slower than we’d like; it’s somewhat understandable as such releasing of transcripts is fairly unprecedented, and this relates to an incredibly sensitive and ‘live’ issue.

Whilst we are having some promising conversations - if you know any lawyers or law firms that have specialised in media law or a similar field, we would be incredibly appreciative if you could either suggest them to us or put us in contact with them. We are reachable anytime on info@openjusticeuk.org.

Our internal deadline was to be able to start releasing documents by the end of August, we are still working towards that as best as we can.

As ever, all messages of support and all offers of assistance (even the people that keep emailing about Epstein) are more appreciated than you could know. This is taking a while, and it has been a big learning curve, but every week we gain more understanding that speeds up this proces,s and things are only getting easier and quicker.

Thank you for your time and patience.
Adam & Melisa