There’s some odd jubilation in some quarters about the Attorney General citing the Miller judgment in her statement attempting to justify breaching international law.
Unfortunately, like the statement itself, the reference to Miller is legally meaningless.
Miller confirms the long-established principle that Parliament is sovereign, but that is not in doubt. Nobody disputes that, as a matter of domestic law, Parliament has the power to legislate contrary to international law.
But we would still be in breach of international law.
Miller is wholly irrelevant to that argument. It does not provide a defence nor a justification for breaching international law.
By citing it, the Attorney General is trying to distract and manipulate those who don’t understand the law.
And some of those people are letting her.
Remember the last episode of Friends where Phoebe causes widespread panic on a plane by shouting that there’s a problem with the “left phalange”?
That, in legal terms, is what the Attorney General is doing by citing Miller.
The crowing is embarrassing to watch.
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Here is a list of reasons why some of my hearings and trials this year have been delayed and kicked off into the long grass, stuck in our record court backlog. Serious allegations which will now be tried *years* after the event. 🧵👇
1. The defendant not being produced at court from prison. 🚚
A classic. It happens due to the private contractors simply not bothering, knowing that the contracts negotiated by government include no meaningful penalty for failure.
Trials every day in every court are affected.
2. The court forgetting to book an interpreter for a defendant.
Another perennial. Every day in every court building.
See also: the court booking an interpreter, and the interpreter just not turning up.
As ever, the usual disclaimer applies. This is an explanation of the law. Not a defence. If that distinction is beyond you, for your own welfare turn back now.
The Mail reports that a man who raped a 13 year-old girl has been deemed “not a dangerous person” by a judge, who accordingly declined to pass an “extended sentence”. The offender instead was sentenced to a determinate (i.e. standard) sentence of 7 years.
Something that the Lucy Connolly case has illustrated - something that is well known to those who work in criminal justice but often overlooked in public debate - is the complexity and nuance in the lives and characters of people appearing before the courts.
A short 🧵👇
Public discussion is obsessed with othering “criminals”.
Bad, irredeemable, monstrous and deserving of as much punishment as the courts can give.
Mitigation is merely lawyerly excuses. They’ve done wrong, ergo they should be locked up.
This worldview is why there has been a sustained media campaign to minimise and excuse Connolly’s offending.
It’s just a “ill advised tweet”. “Hurty words” from a grieving mother. A trivial mistake. Her conviction is an establishment stitch-up.
Why might there be a delay in the details of a police investigation being made public?
Well, many reasons. None of which relate to a conspiracy or a “cover-up”.
Let’s take a quick look🧵👇
First there are the practicalities of modern investigations, particularly in serious and complex cases where the police are reviewing multiple digital devices, such as mobile phones and computers.
Sometimes a device is encrypted, or a suspect won’t give their PIN, which makes it more time-consuming for the police to access the device. If/when they do, a mobile phone “download” can contain tens if not hundreds of thousands of pages to review. This takes time.
Huw Edwards pleaded guilty to “making” 41 indecent photographs of a child.
The first point to note is that “making” is misleading - the offence was possessing them on a computer, rather than creating or recording the images. The law is grossly confusing in this area.
The thread offers a hypothetical of a person breaking a car window to rescue a child, only to find themselves charged with criminal damage and prevented by the judge from mentioning this critical circumstance to the jury.
Just like climate activists.
Only…it’s false.
If you’re sitting cosily for a law lecture (and who among us is not?), the issue arises from one of the legal defences available to criminal damage.
It is a defence if you believe the owner consented or *would have consented* had they known of the damage and its circumstances.