To be fair, the response is not empty. It sets out background material, including figures for the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. According to the letter, since 1999 the SCCRC has completed consideration of 3,575 applications and referred 168 back to the Appeal Court, a referral rate of 4.7 per cent. Of the 151 referred cases determined by the court, 99 were successful. These figures are drawn from the letter; the SCCRC’s own published annual reports are available at sccrc.org.uk.

It also refers to funding for MOJO Scotland, a charity which supports individuals pursuing appeals against conviction, and touches on access to legal representation within the legal aid system. It notes that responsibility for the day-to-day administration of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme lies with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority rather than with Scottish Ministers.

None of that is irrelevant. But none of it answers the central point.

The issue was not whether the law contains safeguards on paper. It was whether the Scottish Government has examined how those safeguards work in reality.

On Moorov, the question was simple: what evidence does the Government have that the doctrine does not increase the risk of wrongful conviction?

The reply does not point to any study, review, dataset or policy analysis. What it offers instead is a restatement of first principles: conviction requires proof beyond reasonable doubt, corroboration is said to protect the innocent, and consultation responses are cited in support of corroboration’s general value.

These are the foundations of the system, not an examination of whether those foundations are holding — and they say nothing about how Moorov itself operates within that framework.

That distinction runs through the whole letter.

Where it is asked for evidence, it offers structure. Where it is asked for analysis, it offers principle. Where it is asked whether risk has been examined, it points instead to the existence of safeguards within the system.

That is especially clear in the section on appeal transcripts. The letter states that the sift stage is designed to assess whether there is legal justification for an appeal, not to re-examine the evidence, and says that a person who believes they have suffered a miscarriage of justice can set out grounds of appeal in general terms using notes taken during the trial, without needing access to the transcript.

That is a policy position. It is not evidence that the absence of transcript access causes no practical difficulty. It is not an analysis of the risk that a person may be unable to identify or articulate a viable ground of appeal without the precise words used in court.

One of the clearest disclosures in the letter appears in the section on false allegations and CICA. After referring to published criminal proceedings statistics and to offences such as perjury and wasting police time, the Government states that there is no mechanism by which those statistics can be filtered to identify cases in which the underlying context involved a false allegation made against another person.

It means one of the most contested questions in this area cannot be answered from the statistics the Government itself relies upon. The information may exist in individual cases, but it cannot be identified or measured at system level.

Seen in isolation, the letter is troubling enough. Against the background of previous responses, the pattern becomes clearer.

In March 2026, this site showed that Scotland’s courts do not record Moorov directions in any searchable format, making it impossible to identify across cases how often juries are directed on one of the most consequential doctrines in Scots criminal law. That earlier piece is here.

A later follow-up showed that the gap has not merely gone unfilled. According to the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service, there has been no project, proposal or discussion in the last ten years about adding searchable fields relating to evidential doctrines such as Moorov. That follow-up is here.

Those findings were about what the system cannot record. This letter adds something else. Even where the blind spots are known, no internal analysis has been carried out into the risks they may create.

This is the point at which the issue stops being merely administrative.

If the courts do not record how often key doctrines are used, if prosecutors cannot readily extract the data, and if the Government has not analysed whether these mechanisms create risk in practice, then the system is not in a position to show that its safeguards work as intended.

It can describe the safeguards, defend their purpose, and point to the formal structure of the law. But that is not the same thing as examining outcomes.

And where outcomes are not examined, errors become harder to see.

The problem is not simply that evidence was not provided in this letter. It is that the letter confirms the evidence has never been gathered.

A justice system that cannot measure how some of its most important mechanisms are used, and has not examined the risks those mechanisms may create, is left asking to be trusted on the strength of design alone.

The next step should not be reassurance. It should be measurement.