The Barrister Bard

Call me curmudgeonly if you will, but I’ve never got my head around Bonfire Night.  I know the history, as do most of you.  Guy Fawkes and a group of other catholic malcontents allegedly plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament on the 5^th November 1605, sending wee King James the First back across the border before his feet could touch the ground.

The historians amongst you will know that Guy’s trial was a travesty of justice.  His defence that he had wandered innocently into the cellars for a quiet drag on his favourite pipe, and that he was caught with a lighted taper standing next to an enormous pile of gunpowder, you could blow me down, or up, with a feather, received short shrift from his accusers and judges alike, who were one and the same, and he was executed.

However, Guy had the last laugh of sorts.  Condemned to be hung, drawn and quartered, he jumped from the ladder with the loose secured around his neck and died instantly, so he wasn’t there to witness the further indignity of castration, disembowelment, quartering and beheading, which in the circumstances looked suspiciously like overkill.  

As an aside, I have to confess that, along with Hadrian and countless others, I have never seen the point of Scotland, so there’s a part of me that chimes with Guy and his chums.  On any view, the Stuart dynasty was a complete disaster.  Charles the First started a civil war, Charles the Second only had eyes for Nell Gwynn and her juicy oranges, and James the Second dropped the Seal of State into the Wash as he fled to France, so even the utterly dull and dour double Dutch were like a breath of fresh air.

But my disquiet over Bonfire Night arises, Phoenix like, from the Explosive Substances Act 1883, which makes it a criminal offence, punishable with life imprisonment, to make or possess an explosive substance.  Set against this legislation is the fact that retail outlets throughout the land offer for sale explosive substances, labelled fireworks, to one and all stupid enough to buy them.  There is no limit to the quantity that can be purchased, and imagine how easily these explosive substances can be adapted to cause death and destruction.  The added tragedy is that children get their hands on them, until they’re blown off, and hospitals work overtime treating assorted injuries from the relatively minor to life threatening.  I had a client, many years ago, who blew off half his face and lost his eyesight, when concocting a firework of his own making.

And then there’s the fire hazard as young and old gather round an enormous pile of combustible material, usually soaked in petrol or kerosene, and gawp in wonder as the flames punch a hole in the ozone layer.

The time has come to draw a line under this absurd festival.  Four hundred years and more are long enough to thank the Lord for this Scottish king’s deliverance.  Let’s move on, and if we must burn effigies on enormous bonfires, I can think of many more deserving characters to consign to the flames than Guy Fawkes.

Jack Straw’s latest perorations on crime and punishment fall well short of a reasoned argument, based as they are on the emotive knee jerk journalism of the tabloids.

I refer to his bald statement that prisons should not be holiday camps, they are there expressly to punish offenders, and too much time and effort is spent on them and not enough on the victims of crime.

His speech is set against the ever increasing prison population, about which more than enough has already been written, but his emphasis on punishment as opposed to rehabilitation is disappointing and short sighted.

No doubt there are researchers out there, and statisticians of every hue, who will tell us that the rate of reconviction of offenders released from prison is in the region of 60%.  That is a staggering and hugely depressing statistic, and the cost to the public purse must be equally staggering.

I visit prisons on a regular basis in the course of my professional practice, and I have yet to find one single prison that can be equated with a holiday camp.  The regime is restrictive, prisoners’ movements are tracked every minute of every day, there is a complete absence of a caring environment, and rather like the worst of state schools, the staff have a siege mentality, simply trying to get through the day without a major disruptive incident.  It’s all about keeping the lid on a boiling cauldron.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are an enormous number of dedicated staff, from prison officers to probation workers to course providers through to chaplains and counsellors, all doing a herculean task with little reward, but they too are fighting a system that doesn’t work.

For the most part, the prison population comes from the most disadvantaged sections of our society, those from broken and violent homes, with few if any educational qualifications, most are barely literate, with no employment prospects above the most basic, like wheeling supermarket trolleys across the car park, and with no sense of direction or purpose in life.  So a period of enforced incarceration should provide the State with a golden opportunity to improve their lot and return them to Society as better men and women.  Above all, to give them hope.  The present system is simply setting them up to fall.

You achieve nothing if you dehumanise offenders from the moment they walk through the prison gates.  A civilised society should aim to give them hope and fulfilment, with the deprivation of their liberty sufficient punishment for their crimes.

The whole question of crime and punishment should be revisited, to include the courts and the very debatable approach now adopted where the imposition of a custodial sentence is the sentence of first resort, not because the judges are in favour of it, but because the Government tells them.

By making the prison environment more user friendly, and more compassionate, you remove at a stroke the hostility simmering below the surface.  If you treat prisoners as human beings, with needs and aspirations, they are more likely to behave like human beings.  By filling their days with meaningful activities pitched at their intellectual level, and by offering them a real chance to improve their lot, they won’t come back.

So enough of this political posturing.  Try a little kindness and compassion, and let the tabloids go hang!

I read with interest the recent visit by the Queen and Prince Philip to the London HQ of Google, location unknown, and hooted with laughter at the very funny spoof on the Today programme of Her Majesty surfing the Net.

But the more I read of Google’s domination of the Internet, the more I am reminded of section 15 of the Theft Act 1968.  That section tells me that it is a criminal offence to dishonestly obtain property by deception, carrying with it a maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment.

I refer, of course, to spam emails flooding the inboxes of onliners, and whilst Google is not the only supplier of internet access, as the market leader they must bear a heavy responsibility.

We all get spam, it goes with the territory, with the most popular questioning the size of my ‘love tool’ [aka ‘Johnson’] and the joys of Viagra.  Quite how my deficiencies on the marital couch are known to these spammers is beyond me, but more disturbing is the fact that my email address is being used without my consent.

Which brings me back to section 15.  I am getting an increasing number of spam emails telling me about untold riches waiting for me if I reply.  The three most popular are:

1. Nigeria, the Internet black hole of Africa, telling me that somebody has died leaving an enormous fortune, and if I ‘pay’ for the transfer of this fortune to a bank of dubious provenance, I will receive 30% of the total proceeds;

2. Running Nigeria a close second is Hong Kong, with an identical scam;

3. The Lottery, anywhere in the world, telling me I’ve won a fortune, and all I have to do is pay a ‘fee’ to a shipping agent to receive a certified cheque.

Given the frequency of these scams, I am getting on average 2 – 3 a day, I assume these scammers are making money out of a lot of people motivated by greed and pig ignorance.  For my part, I get no sense whatsoever that Google and the other Internet Service Providers are doing anything to stop them.  From time to time, when I make the effort to report the scammers, I might get a reply, but no action is taken, jointly or severally, to put an end to this evil practice.

Scammers can only scam if they have an ISP, and ‘gmail’ is the biggest provider on the Net.  So why don’t they check?  If the People’s Republic of China, that paragon of democracy, can shut down internet sites at the click of a mouse, as they did during the Olympics, then why can’t Google police their own illegal activities?  With all their wealth and power, it should be reasonably straightforward.  And forget  all this nonsense about extra territorial jurisdiction, the power of the Internet is global, and should be policed accordingly.

At the end of the day, I suspect it’s all about money without responsibility.  Spams and scams are reaching epidemic proportions, and if the ISPs won’t act to prevent them, then they should be closed down.  It may seem like a sledgehammer approach, but if that’s what it takes, then so be it.

POSTSCRIPT

I read with disbelief [18th October] that the YouTube page set up by the Exeter restaurant bomber Nicky Reilly, also known as Mohammed Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed Alim, was still online even after he had pleaded guilty to attempted murder and terrorist offences, and was only removed after intervention by The Times.  His ‘page’ included videos of the 11th September attacks on the World Trade centre, together with a propaganda video made by al-Qaeda praising the atrocity.  In addition, he had highlights of an ambush on a US convoy in Iraq, material from Somalia and the Beslen  school seige in Russia. YouTube is owned by Google!

I thought the evils of “pooled” recollections by police officers were a thing of the past since the enactment of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, but apparently I was wrong.

For the uninitiated, before the Act, police officers investigating crime would routinely “make up” their pocket book entries together, and their individual recollections of relevant events would be a mirror image of each and every other officer involved, even down to the syntax.  Cross examination of these fine upstanding guardians of law and order was a predictable and sterile exercise, as every question was met with the well rehearsed reply: “If it’s in my pocket book, it must be true, and if it isn’t, I don’t remember”.  Worse still was the interview with the suspect, where no contemporaneous record was kept, no solicitor present, and then, hours later in the comfort of the canteen, the interviewing officers would commit to paper a verbatim account of the interview, which might well have lasted an hour or two.  Almost without exception, the interview concluded with the suspect saying: “It’s a fair cop, guv, I’m bang to rights, looks like I’ll do porridge this time.”  The suspect was never invited to sign the verbatim account as being true!

And the sad reality of this charade was that juries believed these fine upstanding guardians of law and order.  And on the occasions when I invited the police officer to record verbatim my cross examination, in the same way he had recorded the suspect’s interview, the judge would jump in and admonish me.  “A court of law is not the appropriate arena to conduct a forensic exercise of the witness’s mental agility,” he would chunter.  If not a court of law, then where, I ask rhetorically.

The 1984 Act finally acknowledged the possibility of a miscarriage of justice when dishonest police officers fabricated their evidence, and rules were laid down to ensure, where humanly possible, that “confessions” were properly and fairly recorded.

So imagine my dismay when I read the judgment of Mr. Justice Underhill in the High Court concerning the death of Mark Saunders, who was shot dead by the police.  You will recall my own views on the incident in an earlier article [Licence to kill] written at the time of his death.  The judgment, albeit reluctantly expressed, stamps his judicial imprimatur on the practice of police officers conferring before making notes.  According to the Police Federation, this is “a long accepted practice which is intended to achieve best evidence!”  Best evidence for the police officers involved, or best evidence in the search for truth and justice?!?

Mr. Justice Underhill justified the practice on the grounds, inter alia, that preventing officers from conferring would create “a very serious risk of individual officers refusing to provide a statement” and “would encourage a perception that they were…….suspects and not witnesses.”  Utter poppycock!

If police officers have done nothing wrong when shooting dead a fellow citizen, then they have nothing to hide.  If they have, then they need to be held to account.

In the light of the judgment, police chiefs are considering changing the police manual to ban collaboration.  Too little, too late, for Mark Saunders.

There is a tremendous amount of complete garbage spoken and written about drink driving, and recent research by University College London is no exception.  In short, these bone headed researchers, with nothing better to do than spend their grant, have found that by reducing the limit of alcohol to blood from 80 mg, the present limit, to 50 mg, would prevent 65 road deaths and 230 injuries a year.  How on earth can they possibly arrive at these findings?  As I say, it’s complete garbage!

It’s as ridiculous as saying that three quarters of all road accidents happen within 5 miles of the drivers’ home.  Of course they do, as three quarters of all drivers are only driving 5 miles from their home and back, usually to the shops, or better still the pub, where access is denied by non-existent public transport.

Back in the eighties, the government asked a panel of ‘experts’ to devise a system of alcohol consumption which could then be converted into ‘units’. That same panel was then asked to apply ‘units’ to a healthy or unhealthy lifestyle, so X units per week was fine, but X + 1 units was life threatening, and from these “back of a fag packet” calculations arose our drink driving laws.  And guess what?!? When these experts were challenged about their system, they accepted it was totally arbitrary and had no real foundation in medical science.  But this system has been elevated to Elysian proportions, so when I go to my doctor complaining of an ingrowing toenail, I’m cross examined about the number of ‘units’ of alcohol I consume, and how many cigars I smoke, and if I inhale!  I’m here to tell you that at £10 a time, I’m going to inhale!

But back to drink driving.  These same researchers go on to compare our drink drive laws unfavourably with those of Sweden and the Netherlands, where their limits are lower, and consequently, or so the theory goes, they have fewer road accidents.  Have you ever visited these countries?  I mean, let’s get real!  Sweden is buried in snow half the year, so there’s nothing better to do than stay at home, get tanked up on schnapps and listen to Abba’s greatest hits all day and all night long.  And the Netherlands?  Boring, flat as a pancake, and once you’ve seen one tulip, you’ve seen them all!

Common sense, a rare commodity in government these days, comes from the lips of John Fitzpatrick, plucked by Gordon from obscurity to become road safety minister, a post beyond his wildest dreams and a stepping stone to high office.  He says, and I quote: “We are not convinced that dropping [the limit] to 50 is the right answer.  Drivers who are between 50 and 80mg are not the ones we are most worried about.  It’s the ones over 100.”  Amen to that!

English pubs, the bedrock of our society, are closing by the score on a weekly basis, blaming the combination of drink drive and anti smoking laws.  The pub used to be the last refuge of the hen pecked husband, a chance for a chat in a relaxed atmosphere, and putting the world to rights over a pint of mine host’s old peculiar.  Most sensible drinkers know their limit better than researchers from University College or panels of experts.

Of course drunken driving is inexcusable, the more so if it leads to death or serious injury, as happened to the professional footballer who now faces at least 4 years in prison.  What a pointless waste of lives.  But to tar all of us with the same brush is insulting, as it has no basis in medical science or any other reliable measure.  Talking of measures, make mine a large one!