It takes the police years to investigate allegations, because of your government’s cuts to police budgets.
It takes digital investigators years to analyse mobile phones and computers because of your cuts to forensic science and refusal to heed warnings gov.uk/government/new…
Suspects are left in limbo for years, “released under investigation” because your botched reform of bail laws - designed to catch headlines - had consequences that anybody could have foreseen. Cases drift as underresourced police forces are spread thin. lawgazette.co.uk/news/release-u…
When a suspect is eventually charged, it takes another 6 months to bring them before the magistrates’ court for their first appearance. So there is an inbuilt delay of years before cases even get to court dorsetecho.co.uk/news/18838108.…
Once a case actually gets to the Crown Court, you wait at least a year in most bail cases before a trial slot.
Why?
Because your government cut court “sitting days”, artificially restricting the number of trials that could be heard.
Your government saw a backlog of 30,000 Crown Court cases and thought “Let’s cut the budget even further. Let’s make victims, witnesses and suspects wait even longer. Nobody will notice.”
Covid has made things worse, for sure. But a large part is because of your negligent mishandling. You said that 200 new courts were needed (after selling off 300). You have found only 18.
So yes, Labour may well have made a pig’s ear of the system when they were in charge. But who’s been in government for the past 11 years, Chris?
Who’s responsible for the children in my cases having to wait years for closure in cases alleging serious sexual abuse?
Grow up.
That you see this as a chance to politick, to play yah boo sucks partisan willy-waving, when there are people whose lives are being torn apart by your appalling mishandling of the justice system, says as much as anybody needs to know about you.
You owe the public an apology.
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Every time we warned, we urged, we begged, we wrote books - trying to draw attention to what government was doing to criminal justice, we were ignored.
Instead the public was treated to foaming nonsense about “soft sentences” and protecting statues.
It is very disappointing to hear the chair of the @MagsAssoc giving evidence to Parliament and suggesting that junior barristers are lying about their experiences of Covid in the magistrates’ courts.
When presented with first person accounts of barristers being compelled to attend magistrates’ courts in person for no good reason, the chair of @MagsAssoc first blames me(!), and then says it is someone “enjoying themselves at our expense on Twitter”.
This is appalling.
By all means use your time in front of the Justice Committee to complain about anonymous Twitter rabbits, but don’t you dare accuse my colleagues of lying, @MagsAssoc. You owe them a public apology.
You don’t have to commit a particularly serious crime to receive 6 months’ imprisonment. You don’t even have to be sentenced at the Crown Court - under Patel’s plans, sentences passed at magistrates’ courts, in conditions of abject chaos, could lead to automatic deportation.
Important to note that there is already a mechanism by which the Home Office can deport foreign nationals who cause serious harm or persistently offend, and who receive sentences of 6 months. But Patel wants to make it automatic, irrespective of harm caused.
The position currently is that any foreign national sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment is liable for automatic deportation. These plans would radically increase the number of people affected.
This lecture explores the Christmas classic Jingle All The Way through the lens of English & Welsh law.
Contributions are welcome, but I'm perfectly prepared to tweet the entire film to a wall of embarrassed silence.
This paper considers, inter alia, how Arnie/Howard’s intrepid search for the perfect Christmas present might have been different had he, Sinbad and the whole gang been subject to the law of England and Wales.
Some basic rules so we’re all singing from the same song sheet:
As I am not an American lawyer, nor diligent enough to do the research, we assume that all activity takes place in the jurisdiction of England and Wales.
Some initial observations about this case, and in particular what the Court of Appeal made of the Attorney General’s application to refer these sentences as “unduly lenient”.
Spoiler: it makes uncomfortable reading for the Attorney General.
First, by way of background. I was one of several commentators astonished that the Attorney General, who has no known experience of practising criminal law, decided to personally present this serious case at the Court of Appeal.
Comments leaked to the press confirmed this was a political decision, to capitalise on a tragic case in the headlines.
A “friend” of the Attorney General told the Express that she was pursuing the case *against* legal advice. She also took a preemptive pop at the judges.