Proboscideicide

If anyone reading this is, or is acquainted with, a journalist, would they please, in the interest of sanity (especially mine) prevail upon the wordsmiths to stop,and I mean stop, using the cliché "The elephant in the room".

The sodding phrase is everywhere. It is near-enough meaningless. Even when explained, it is a poor metaphor.

Just stop it. Now. Then there may be no further consequences. Use it again - any of you - and I may not be responsible for my actions.

Is that clear? Is it?

I am off to lie down now, but don't forget what I said, will you now?

All-Time Great Jokes (Not Necessarily Legal) No.147

Harry Hutton has just come up with the following gem:-

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Britain’s teachers. If it weren’t for them we’d all be speaking German. And French. And Latin. And be able to do sums.

Jealous - Moi?

Have a look at this man's post. Am I the only one to feel that I made a wrong career decision in my youth?

Cocaine

There is a fascinating clip on You Tube showing the production of cocaine from stripping the leaves to the final powder form. The final product, it is said, sells for $800 per kilo, a sum that grows to £50,000 on the streets of London.

The photographer (who appears to be English) must have run a considerable risk in going into the Colombian jungle. I hope that his film gets wider circulation.

Later: The clip has been taken down from You Tube, but as I had hoped the film did get a wider audience. It won the Editors' Choice on Newsnight, and the programme showed a 10-minute version of it in January.

Prison

I have often commented on the fact that for many people any sentence not including imprisonment is no more than a slap on the wrist, and that there is a widespread view that prison sentences are too short.

According to the (rather out-of-date) figures published by the Home Office, if we were to incarcerate the same percentage of our population as the United States does, then instead of the 78,000 people currently in prison in the UK we would have to find room for 385,000.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

More Sentencing

The Magistrates' Association site has some interesting sentencing examples both for common offences and for a couple of new ones, including voyeurism, which is a charge that I came across for the first time a couple of weeks ago.

(Later) Elisabeth, who is a JP in the South-East, has emailed this germane comment:

I wrote to The Magistrate to complain about this motoring example as it appeared either just before or just after a table of the normal speeding offences for which a fixed penalty is offered.

This excess speed fell within the FP tariff and should probably have been dealt with as such, unless there were exceptional cirumstances.

No wonder people say we don't know our arses from our elbows!

Elisabeth

Thank you for that.

These Lads Don't Miss Much

Next month the new rules for Legal Aid will be introduced. The aim is to save about £35 million per year, but that is within the potential margin of error, in the view of many practitioners. One big worry is that getting means information from defendants will be difficult, and that will cause delay in the courts, just as the efforts put in over recent years are starting to pay off.

Circulars are going out at the moment to players in the system, and here is a priceless extract:-

Adopting a weighted scale of this sort allows for a much more meaningful comparison of relative incomes. In practice, it allows us to recognise, for example, that a couple with dependent children will need a higher income to achieve the same standard of living as a couple with no children.

So that's all right then.

Magistrates and Rowlocks

Magistrates from Kingston Upon Thames will be rowing in the Great River Race next Saturday.




Photo shows some of the crew. The one on the right who looks like an off-duty waiter is their senior legal adviser.

I propose to send them a tenner towards the charity, and I hope that a few of you will want to contribute a bit too.

Any cheques sent to:

Matt Preston JP,
c/o The Clerk to the Justices,
The Guildhall
Kingston-upon-Thames
Surrey
KT1 1EU

made payable to 'Xpression' with a slip of paper saying "Internet Donation to River Race" will, I promise, be put to good charitable use. (Xpression is a Registered Charity)

Justice is Blind

The BBC has the story, with which most of us are familiar, of a man who drove a car, mercifully with a friend beside him, without having the traditional asset of a pair of eyes, or indeed of any eyes at all.

One has to feel for the duty CPS person, who had to decide what to charge. Dangerous driving it was then. Pretty hard to deny that one, in all the circumstances.

Sentencers have had their discretion limited little by little over the years, and the sentencing court in this case had no alternative (it's here on page 162) to imposing a ban and requiring a compulsory re-test. Naturally, that looks ludicrous, and the press have taken full advantage of the opportunity to imply, nudge-nudge, that the courts are stupid and gullible. The man was given a suspended prison sentence (more press mockery, but what the hell is the point of cluttering up a cell with this guy?).

Whoever sentenced this bloke was asked a silly question, and the law required them to give a silly answer. What else could have they have done?


(Thanks to Bill for the link)

Going to Pot Again

Steve has kindly sent me this link. I have blogged before about cannabis, and I shall be interested to see how the debate turns out. A good friend of mine will be a delegate at the conference, so I might ring him up for a bit of quiet lobbying.

For what it's worth, I am as concerned as the next man about the prevalence of high strength cannabis, especially now that we are becoming aware of possible links to psychotic damage from the drug, but this proposal seems unlikely to help. The use of cannabis is endemic among many young and quite a few not-so-young people and in most cases detection is unlikely. To fiddle around with classification will deter no-one, and the gesture value will also be nil.