WINOL returns

Back to WINOL

The final year is now amongst us, and we're all back ready to kick start another successful year of WINOL. Together with the second years we have formed a new team, who is ready to embrace new changes and exciting challenges. Personally, I chose to keep my role as chief crime and court reporter as it's the beat I have the most engagement with both in and out of WINOL, and therefore I would like to continue to develop my skills and knowledge within a patch I am most interested in. The Innocence project is also vast approaching which I am extremely eager to begin investigating.

New Changes 

The biggest change to my role this semester is the development of a crime unit, in previous semesters it has been the solo court reporter but now with a group together we can actively produce a greater amount of content for online and broadcast. An extremely exciting proposal has been offered to us by The Justice Gap will now be working in partnership with Winchester News Online, this is a honourable experience for us as students to produce news reports for a national established website. Weekly we will be in contact with the editor Jon Robins to discuss current criminal affairs, whereby he will commission us to write news reports. Currently the website has a lot of comment analysis and timeless blog posts but the idea with working with WINOL is to adapt a news section offering readers reaction to current breaking stories. 

The Justice Gap is an online magazine about the law and justice. It has been running for two years now with the aim to shine a light and expose elements of the justice system that do not receive enough coverage in the mainstream media. It has adopted a particular point of view which is left leaning and liberal - campaigners, lawyers and professionals involved in the law contribute towards writing comment pieces on the site on topics such as human rights, civil liberties, consumer law and miscarriages of justice.

Primarily the site was set up to promote 'access to justice' as there are doubts that the system isn't working; it is there for people who may be out of touch with there rights thus struggling to get justice.  

Michael Mansfield QC who is the leading human rights lawyer contributes articles towards the justice gap, which he refers to as "The section of the public too poor to afford a lawyer and not poor enough to qualify for legal aid". David Jessel who was a commissioner for the CCRC is another key figure involved in The Justice Gap who explains it as the difference between law and justice. 

In collaboration with The Justice Gap we will also be doing some video interviews with some high profile professionals in the legal field, so keep your eyes peeled - more details to follow soon!