Visible Justice

No, I’m not a lawyer. But.

Today’s good news: the Scottish weather is reinforcing my new determination to be a disciplined writer. For several days around here it’s been like a particularly depressing remake of The Others. If I start hearing old-lady voices coming from the cats, I’ll let you know.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

This week I’d intended to post about the conclusion of my legal case. Bear with me, because it may be over, but regarding my final statement I’m still ironing out a few legal kinks. That’s not a reference to those judges and lawyers whose hard drives we’d all like to see checked, but a train of thought did chug in its wake.

I’d call it a “topical” train of thought, but sadly it’s never not topical. That was reinforced just this morning when @dearaunty on X sent me a news story from 2017. Londoner Shafak Abbas, pulled over for driving without insurance, sounded suspiciously evasive to the police who stopped him. On further investigation they discovered a BB gun in the footwell of his gold Mercedes. And then they discovered the “distressed” 26-year-old woman locked in his boot.

She was known to him, as if that makes any difference. Maybe that’s why he pled not guilty, despite the officers’ bodycam footage. Maybe he thought he had some kind of right of possession. Maybe he seriously thought he’d get away with it.

Actually he was right about the last part, because he pretty much did. A 15-month jail sentence was eventually reduced for good behaviour (he was clearly a very well-behaved sort of chap). No, I didn’t mistype “15-year sentence” for kidnap and possession of a weapon.

Fifteen months.

I know less about the French judicial system than I do about the Scottish or UK systems, and what I know about the latter two is zilch (as my legal team would confirm). I am on firmer ground with political theory, though. And with realpolitik, too. I am definitely on firmer ground with what you might loosely call the Real World.

Justice must be seen to be done

…Or, to be precise, “It is not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” Those were the much-quoted words of Lord Hewart, presiding over the King’s Bench, in November 1923. Supported by his two fellow judges, he had quashed a conviction on the grounds that the trial judges had allowed a deputy clerk to sit in on their deliberations - a clerk who happened to be a partner in the firm involved in the civil side of the trial. Lord Hewart did not believe at all that the clerk’s presence had affected the judgment, but that what mattered was what might appear to have been done.

(You can Google the details of the case. Heaven knows I had to.)

I grant you, the principle proceeded from a contested ten-quid fine for a minor traffic collision a century ago. Legally, perhaps it has no bearing on some of the law-related SNAFUs we’ve seen in recent times. Politically, it very much does.

The appearance of justice is important not just in technical arguments about the presence of a silent-but-potentially-conflicted deputy clerk in a room full of judges. It’s absolutely crucial to faith in the entire legal system. It’s all very well for lawyerly types to lecture enraged posters on X about sentencing guidelines and whatever the merry-hell else, but if Joe and Jenny Public lose faith in the entire legal infrastructure and its legitimacy, we’re heading up the proverbial creek, and the helmsman chucked the paddle overboard quite a long way downstream.

Case in point 1: Gisele Pelicot

The emetic details of this French court case have justifiably obsessed social media in the last week or so. Gisele is the astonishingly courageous woman who waived her anonymity and demanded that the trial of 51 of the men accused of her rape should be conducted publicly. The shame was not hers, so why indeed should the men involved escape exposure? Put the shame where it belongs.

Gisele’s husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had been drugging her into unconsciousness for a decade so that he could invite friends, neighbours and complete strangers to rape her. That husband created a hard-drive file with some 4,000 photos and videos of the crimes, and Gisele found out about her abuse only when she was shown the images by the police. By then she had contracted four STDs; she had been raped six times by one man who was HIV positive. Her lapses in memory had made her fear she was in the first stages of dementia; Dominique Pelicot had comforted her as she consulted doctors.

“He was our neighbour… I used to see him at the bakery,” Gisele said of one of her accused rapists. “He was always polite. I had no idea he was coming to rape me.”

Here’s the point at which the judge, Roger Arata, gently scolded the victim. In order to respect the presumption of innocence, he reminded her, it had been agreed in court that the word “rape” should not be used. Not even in the personal testimony of the victim, it seemed. The recommended phrase was “sex scene”.

You know. Like in a movie.

Case in point 2: @Wommando’s timeline on X

You should follow her, by the way. I say that even though it might be a disheartening experience.

She’s perfectly lovely in real life, and she is a terrific source of information about the most egregious cases of men getting legal wrist-slaps for the worst of behaviour. I’ll use a smattering of examples from the last week or so.

“17/8/2024: Paedophile & DWPgovuk worker, Aimen Touati, 41, caught with 100s of pics & vids of 6-mnth-old babies being sexually abused & raped, has walked free. The Recorder accepted he was ‘genuinely ashamed’ & had ‘good prospect of rehabilitation in the community’.”

“30/8/2024: Plymouth: Paedophile Jonathan Davey, 37, found with almost 600 pics and vids of children being sexually abused or raped, has walked free from court. He was warned ‘all options’, including jail, were being considered, but was handed a community order.”

“01/09/2024: Former security guard, Trevor Rees, 69, who tried to meet ‘15-yr-old’ for sexual activity & had 600+ images of children being raped, has walked free. His sentence was suspended for 2 years with a ‘mental health requirement’; no details of this reported.”

“05/09/2024: A former @metpoliceuk officer convicted of possessing CSA images & engaging in sexual comms with a child will ‘NOT BE NAMED AS WD BREACH HIS HUMAN RIGHTS’. A witness said the offender’s MH was ‘extremely fragile’ & planned suicide should he be named.’”

“06/09/2024: Former MoD police officer, Stewart Neely, who pled guilty to possessing CSA images, has walked free. A source said: ‘How is this fair & where is the justice? How do I keep my kids safe in the streets when he is allowed to carry on as if nothing happened?’”

“06/09/2024: Paedophile stable hand, Anderson Morales Ramon, 32, found with 100s of CSA images & preyed on girls’ love of horses to groom them into sexual activity, has walked free. Defence said he was 26 at the time, was immature & ‘isolated & depressed’.”

“06/09/2024: PONTYPOOL: Paedophile, Thomas Dyke, 24, caught by police with images of children as young as 2 being sexually abused or raped, has walked free. Judge: ‘You’re not working & rely on your father financially… stop being a leech &… earn money of your own’.”

“09/09/2024: HULL: Paedophile, Neil Smith, 49, who admitted making ‘disgusting’ Category A video and images of girls being raped, has walked free from court. Judge: ‘I take into account the effect an immediate sentence would have on you, particularly your loved ones.’”

I’ll stop there. You get the obscene picture. And like me, you probably now have an automatic nausea response to the two-word phrase “walked free”.

Wommando’s post on the Thomas Dyke case got this response from @LilyLilyMaynard (also well worth a follow, by the way):

“The judges really don’t think it’s a big deal. They show us this over and over again.”

It’s a fair conclusion to draw. Any excuse will do for the offenders: laziness, immaturity, “mental fragility”, depression. And good to know that blatant emotional blackmail, like that of the anonymous Met officer, can be used as mitigation in the British courts. Judges really don’t appear to think these offences are that important. It’s only pictures, right? It’s only children. It’s only girls. No Big Deal.

Just a movie, perhaps. Just a sex scene.

Case in point 3: “Two-Tier Keir”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pro-riots. Some public order offences demand a prison sentence, and that includes threatening to burn down a hotel with people in it. At the same time, I’m not pro-jailing-people even for wildly stupid social media posts — at least when “misinformation” seems to be rather a subjective offence. (Somebody wake me when Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate finally gets a knock on the door for spreading a complete and dangerous fiction about acid attacks on Muslim women.)

This one isn’t on judges, but the disregard for victims is a common thread. Labour weren’t exactly under media pressure to explain all of their policies before the election, so they might have used some of that luxuriant space and time to plan something better than the early release of violent abusers. Yes, in a critically overcrowded system they had to make room for street thugs (well, the right-wing politically motivated ones). But merrily reducing the terms of existing convicted criminals seems — let’s just say a casual approach to a solution. Domestic abusers, sex offenders and terrorists are supposedly excluded, but only offences specific to domestic violence (like non-fatal strangulation) are exempted. A man convicted of common assault or actual bodily harm would be eligible for (even earlier) early release, unless his sentence was a minimum of four years.

Glancing back at some judges’ sentencing habits, four years doesn’t sound like much of a firewall.

Case in point 4: ‘Ellen S’ and the family courts

An X account I will call Ellen S has had the misfortune of involvement with the Family Courts. It was her ex who was charged with several accounts of child cruelty — bear that in mind when I say that the court placed “restrictions”. They placed them not on her ex, but on Ellen herself.

“I was warned by the Judge that if I was out with my boys and got distracted, or even turned my back on them for a sec — ‘cause hypothetically he could access them — then I was looking at prison time for failure to protect.

“Bear in mind he [the ex] had no restrictions at all.”

The ex was allowed supervised access with a court-approved person — but that person left the ex alone with the boys. When that was disclosed in family court, nothing was done. The man in question had also planned to force his son — at seven to eight years old — to testify in the High Court on his behalf in his criminal trial for assault. He waited till the last possible moment to plead guilty and spare the child that trauma. And what was the jail time he received?

Come on everybody, sing it with me: he walked free.

I’m not sure which excuse impressed the judge at the ex’s criminal trial: perhaps it was the man’s laziness again? Or immaturity, or depression? Leeching off his dad? At any rate, what My Lord described as “over-enthusiastic discipline” left a child deaf in one ear.

Who was thereafter bound with restrictions by the Family Court? The child’s mother, of course.

As Ellen comments, with an air of exhausted resignation: “There isn’t a therapy on earth that can rid you of the trauma that is Family Court.”

Case in point: The One That Peaked Me

That’s not strictly accurate, because I don’t remember exactly what it was in gender ideology that “peaked” me, in the Terf terminology. But I peaked in around 2017, and this happened in 2017. What I do know is that this was a major element in that moment of saying to myself, at last: “They want WHAT?”

Maria MacLachlan, a woman in her sixties, was assaulted at a women’s meeting at Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner, that totemic place of free speech in the UK. Her attacker was a big brute of a bloke who went by the name of “Tara Wolf.” Wolf was arrested; the case came to court.

And there it was, in a holy place of blind British justice and before the solemn and dignified gentlemen who mete it out, that Maria MacLachlan was ordered to respect the big male thug’s pronouns.

*

These cases are snapshots. They’re random and they’re mostly just from the last few days. They’re illustrative, that’s all.

No, Secret as well as Entirely Open Barristers, I am not a lawyer. I don’t pretend to know the technicalities of any of these cases. I don’t pretend to understand precedent or case law or sentencing guidelines or the wretched Equal Treatment Bench Book that’s caused so much havoc in women’s lives (rape victims too have been ordered to use their rapists’ preferred pronouns). What I do know is that there’s a miasma around the legal system, and it smells suspiciously like misogyny.

It doesn’t smell good. It doesn’t look good. We need the rule of law; it’s one of the bedrocks of our liberal democracy. It has evolved over centuries; it has sometimes — often, in hindsight — been wrong. But we need it, and we can’t afford to lose it. It can’t always be treated as some dainty, esoteric plaything of the men and women who work in it (and sometimes of people who know how to work it). It can’t always be a game of clever words and arcane knowledge. It has to work for the population at large, or they’ll stop trusting it.

(Just look at the BBC.)

Even if you could convince me, by some almost magical sleight of argument, that there isn’t something rotten in the system — or at least something that has gone badly awry — it wouldn’t matter. It’s the perception of that system that matters. People have to be able to have faith in the law.

It’s not my job to fix it, and it’s not Ellen’s or Maria’s or Wommando’s. We don’t know the first thing about it. You don’t have to listen to a word we say. It’s just that — if you want the gen pop to respect the system as much as you do — you might consider taking an objective look at those optics. And (hence my mention of Starmer) politicians have a role in this too. They’re the ones who are supposed to care about How These Things Look.

That deputy clerk in 1923 wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to affect the outcome of a traffic case. Judge Hewart knew perfectly well the man wouldn’t have dreamed of it. Every judge and clerk and lawyer involved knew that no foul play was involved, that all was above board, that the traffic conviction was entirely justified and so was the ten pound fine.

But the verdict was still overturned. Judge Hewart was right then, and he’s right now. Justice Must Be Seen To Be Done.

And for light relief:

Manny. Because he’s worth it.

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