One of the many, varied joys of practising crime is the privilege of seeing first hand, each and every day, how absolutely useless the criminal law can be. This week – 18 to 24 April – heralds National Stalking Awareness Week, and presents an unmissable opportunity for me to mount my high hobby horse-shaped soap box to…
Read moreYou call this justice? On yer bike
Since this blog was ill-advisedly conceived 10 months ago, I have directed a handful of pot shots towards a variety of people. The media – the Metro and the BBC are notable recidivists in poor legal reporting – MPs, magistrates, the CPS, the Ministry of Justice, and more recently, albeit a fight not of my…
Read moreWhy was this crucial evidence hidden from the jury?
Today is for obvious reasons a dark day, and I don’t wish to dim the light further by dwelling unnecessarily on tragedy. But, while it’s still doing the rounds in news cycles, just a brief word, if I may, on the “revelations” that have been published in the wake of the conviction of Clayton Williams…
Read moreHas Philip Davies MP just proposed the stupidest law of all time?
I’ve heard some stupid ideas in my time. The proposed “sentence escalator” is a classic, providing that “any person convicted of the same criminal offence on more than one occasion must receive a longer custodial sentence for the second or subsequent offence than his longest previous sentence for the same offence” – regardless of the facts…
Read moreThe Metro should be ashamed of this blatant dishonesty
Another Thursday, another news outlet seemingly heck bent on grabbing my dander and yanking it to attention. Today is the turn of the Metro to use its front page to demonstrate how to merrily defecate on the quaint outmoded journalistic principles of “fairness” and “accuracy”. Although, extending to the Metro the fairness that it has…
Read moreOk BBC, so what SHOULD we spend defending criminals?
I shall be brief and to the point. I had not planned on blogging today. But then came along the BBC. With this: Becky killers got £400,000 in legal aid https://t.co/94MTgSzd3z — BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 3, 2016 Now, this kind of “story” I’ve come to expect from certain news-peddlers. The Mail, the Telegraph, the…
Read moreJoint Enterprise: Just a few quick things
This morning the Supreme Court handed down judgment in R v Jogee; Ruddock v The Queen [2016] UKSC 8 , and everyone’s mighty excited. This case – dealing with the principles of what is (lazily) referred to in the media as “joint enterprise” – is leading the lunchtime news bulletins and will probably fill up much of the…
Read moreIt’s not the police’s job to “believe victims”
I make plain at the outset that I will forever, until the untimely end of my days and beyond, harbour a residual affection for anyone, of any political persuasion, who tells Diane Abbott to fuck off. At any time of day, in any given context, this is surely always the right thing to do. But…
Read moreIs the CPS really considering putting a dead man on trial?
So, Lord Greville Janner has defiantly – and incomparably selfishly – gone and shuffled off this mortal coil before the various allegations against him can be the subject of a trial of the facts in April next year. There, one would think, this wholly sorry example of the criminal justice system misfiring at almost every turn grinds…
Read moreFantastic Dr Fox may be not guilty, but he’s also far from vindicated
As Robert Duvall didn’t quite say, I love the smell of an acquittal in the morning. Nothing else in the world smells like that. Granted, I’ve only enjoyed the olfactory pleasure vicariously, but as a barrister there are few feelings as gratifying as taking the fight to the state on behalf of a client and…
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