SOURCE: “Turning to Crime,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 18, 1991, p. 17.

In the following review, Papineau calls Murmuring Judges mere “easy entertainment.”

Few things are more unacceptable than the long-term imprisonment of an innocent person. Yet the British criminal justice system seems to find these hideous mistakes easy to make and almost impossible to correct. Under pressure to secure convictions, the police are tempted to concoct cases out of bogus confessions and forged evidence. And, even after the error becomes clear, the victims can languish for years in gaol, because the judicial system has no effective safeguard against police corruption.

The advance publicity for David Hare’s new play, Murmuring Judges, may have led theatregoers to expect some engagement with the implications of such miscarriages of justice: if so, they will be disappointed. Far from offering an analysis of the unhappy symbiosis between imaginative policemen and unimaginative judges, Hare...