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Falsification of evidence

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Falsifying evidence to obtain convictions is an offence that individual Police officers are particularly prone to. The limits to what convictions can be obtained with legitimately obtained evidence drives some officers to consider that falsifying evidence is the lesser of two evils. However, the dangers of this are that the police then also become the arbiters of justice, whereas they should only exist to collect evidence in a neutral way.

There have been several high level cases in England in the last 30 years, where groups of people have been jailed for crimes they did not commit, due to the selective use, or falsification of, evidence. Examples of this are

These and other miscarriages of justice eventually prompted the formation of the Crown Prosecution Service. The idea was to remove from the police the ability to decide who to prosecute, but the CPS fared no better, and there were further miscarriages of justice as well as several high level cases collapsing.

In the United States, one form of falsifying evidence is called the snitch jacket, a process whereby false evidence of an activist being a police informer in left in a public place where it can be found by colleagues of an activist, so that the person being targeted is discredited.

See also