Samenvatting

Recently there have been several miscarriages of justice in the Netherlands, which were widely reported in the media. They show that much can go wrong with legal proof in criminal cases and that judges sometimes give limited justification for their decisions. Insights from the so-called story-based approach to legal proof can potentially assist to improve and to critically assess judicial decisions in criminal cases, thereby helping to reduce the chance of mistakes. The story-based approach involves constructing and critically analyzing at least two stories about what (might have) happened in a case that explain the evidential data. These stories have to be compared to each other in order to decide which story is the most plausible. The judge has to include the different scenarios in his judgment and he must explain why the scenario he had chosen is the most plausible. In my paper I first discuss why it is important that judges justify their decision in a verdict. Then I explicate the story based approach. After that I explain how applying the story based approach in the motivation can be useful and help to reduce the chance of a miscarriage of justice.