.@BorisJohnson has refused point blank to resource the courts. His government has cut court capacity, causing a backlog of over half a million cases.
When Covid hit and made things even worse, @BorisJohnson still refused to make money available to assist the courts.
There is now typically a delay of 2 to 3 years between a crime being reported and a case coming to trial. In that time, witnesses’ memories fade. Many lose faith and disappear. So cases collapse.
If I were a guilty criminal, I would raise a toast to @BorisJohnson every day.
“Tougher sentencing” is snake oil. It means nothing when it is taking years to bring people to trial; when the government’s conscious policy is to force witnesses and victims of crime to wait years for a trial, rather than spend a relatively tiny amount on resourcing the courts.
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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.
As the issue of compensation for miscarriages of justice is rightly in the news, it’s timely to note that in 2014, the government changed the law to make it all but impossible for people wrongly convicted and imprisoned to claim compensation.
Chris Grayling and Theresa May led the charge to deprive the wrongly convicted of compensation, changing the rules so that those people had to effectively prove their innocence - an impossible standard to meet.
The details are in Stories of The Law & How It’s Broken.
When this spiteful non-compensation scheme was challenged in the courts, the current crop of politicians - those who are now positioning themselves as champions of the wrongfully convicted - fought all the way to uphold it.