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Herring. Criminal Law: Text, Cases, and Materials (8 edn, 2018). p. 728 last para.

      By contrast with the House of Lords, the view taken here is that a conviction for a stigmatic offence is a sanction in its own right and that sanctions should be confined to the blameworthy. The non- conviction of the blameless should be a pervasive principle of substantive criminal law limited only by the need to theorize and practise criminal law as a system of rules and by the exigencies of forensic practicability. Those limitations entail that many ‘normal’ life narratives cannot afford grounds of excuse, however exculpatory the force of the narrative may be. But other accounts, not currently represented in standard defences, can be brought within the framework of substantive criminal law. If it can be done it should be done in order to diminish the incidence of unnecessary criminal convictions.

I can't even infer which of the two meanings of "forensic"!

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Forensic in this context means "relating to courts of law."

Practicability includes viability, achievability and attainability among its synonyms.

One way of rephrasing the paragraph:

The non- conviction of the blameless should be a pervasive principle of substantive criminal law limited only by the need to theorize and practise criminal law as a system of rules and by the exigencies of forensic practicability.

Is to say words to the effect:

Not convicting innocent people should be a key objective, restricted only by the rule of law and the necessity for what can realistically be achieved by the courts.

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  • Just FYI, from Nai's profile: "This account is temporarily suspended network-wide. The suspension period ends on Oct 8". Probably due to low quality questions. Mar 31, 2021 at 18:27

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