The Lord President, Lord Carloway, has commissioned a review of how Scottish courts conduct rape and other sexual offence cases. Lord Carloway hopes to develop proposals on how to improve the way cases are handled for complainers and witnesses, without compromising the rights of the accused.

From next month, the Glasgow Sheriff Court Alcohol Court is to deal with domestic abuse cases in which alcohol ‘significantly contributed to the offending’.

On Monday 21st January 2019, the landmark draft Domestic Abuse Bill was published, aimed at pursuing offenders and supporting victims and their families. The Bill comes after it is revealed domestic abuse costs the country £66 billion a year and is said to provide a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to transform how the UK responds to domestic violence.

We are proud to announce that Martin, Johnston & Socha have received a nomination for Criminal Defence Firm of the Year at the 2019 Scottish Legal Awards. This distinction is a welcome recognition to the dedication of our specialist team of criminal defence solicitors and we look forward to the results which will be announced at the awards ceremony on 21st March.

A study conducted by the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR) has found that having to declare criminal convictions on job applications often deters candidates from applying, and is not the most effective way of predicting the risk of reoffending.

The Scottish Government has announced £8.5 million in funding over three years to improve services for sexual crime victims, such as forensic medical examinations.

The Scottish Government has released a new report that highlights the characteristics of victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse acts in Scotland. During the 2017-18 period, 59,541 incidents of domestic abuse were recorded by the police in Scotland; an increase of one per cent on 2016-17.

As the holiday approaches we would like to take this opportunity to inform valued clients and potential new customers of our Christmas opening hours - we will be closed on the following dates -:

Claire Baker MSP has lodged a proposal for a Bill to amend the law of culpable homicide. According to Baker, “the reform of the law of culpable homicide is overdue” because it remains challenging to hold large or medium-size organisations to account.

The Scottish Government released a statistical bulletin on the homicide recorded by the police in Scotland in 2017-18. The bulletin accounts for the number of cases involving homicide but not the number of victims in each case.

In October 2018, one year after it was initially proposed by John Finnie MSP, the Children (Equal Protection from Assault) (Scotland) Bill reached the Equalities and Human Rights Committee of the Scottish Parliament, which is leading the scrutiny of the Bill.

A new report carried out by the Scottish Government looked at data on robbery in the past decade.

A new Vulnerable Witnesses Bill has been proposed to the Scottish Parliament and, if accepted by the Parliament, the new legislation would enable the statements of child witnesses to be pre-recorded in advance of the trial. Most recently, the Faculty of Advocates responded to the bill, claiming they had ‘no opposition’ to the introduction of the rule.

According to the Scottish Government’s statistical report on the criminal justice system, both the rate of reconviction and the average number of reconvictions per person have been slowly decreasing since 2003. The statistics are based on the data of people who were released from custody in 2015-16 or received a non-custodial sentence during that period.

Businesses in Scotland suffered losses of £1.8 million in the first half of 2018 compared to losses of £3.8 million in the same period last year, according to new data from KPMG. The report, which measures alleged fraud cases with losses of £100,00 or more within the UK courts, shows that Scotland is doing more favourably compared to other UK regions where fraud losses are on the rise. 

A recent BBC article reported that the prosecution service is to be given a cash injection of £1.1m by the Scottish Government, following an increase in the number of sexual offences reported in Scotland. The extra money, which will be given to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) and the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS), aims to improve communication between the prosecution service and alleged victims and minimise delays in sexual offence cases progressing to court.

Marking the conclusion of a landmark equality project in Scotland, the final report of the Criminal Justice Disability Project (CJDP) was published on 31 July 2018.

The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee has adopted new rules to speed up the freezing and confiscation of criminal assets across the EU. 

There has been a fall in the number of crimes involving the handling of offensive weapons over the last ten years in Scotland, according to a new report from the Scottish Government. 

A call for evidence has been launched over proposed new legislation that aims to provide vulnerable witnesses and victims of crime with a better experience of the criminal justice system in Scotland.