Heavy Matters

In the remand court, as opposed to a trial court, the bench see a steady stream of defendants charged with anything from the trivial to the downright nasty, and after a while they tend to blur into each other a bit. Just occasionally though we can sense a change of atmosphere. The court staff look just a little more grave, perhaps some of the seats fill up with unfamiliar faces, a reporter or two may appear, and we find ourselves dealing with something out of the ordinary. On one occasion we found ourselves faced by half a dozen burly men in the side seating, all wearing jackets but with obvious anti-stab vests underneath. They had that look that spoke CID, but it was after the case had been dealt with that we found out that there had also been armed officers in the court foyer. Up came three black men, jointly charged with trafficking in cocaine, following the seizure of a million poundsworth. What had prompted the security was the fact that in searching the home of one of the men a gun had been recovered, and that gun had been forensically linked to two murders. All three had a wodge of pre-cons, and previous involvement with Yardie gangs - there were no applications for bail. Once they had gone, sent off to the Old Bailey, the atmosphere in the courtroom relaxed noticeably, and we went back to our list of drunk drivers and shoplifters.

Just a Few More Steps to Meltdown

This report in The Times sums up much of what I have been blogging about for a while. The bottom line is that the policies that have filled up the prisons were all introduced by this Government, but that the same government has not just failed to provide the required resources, but refuses to take any action at all, for fear of the tabloids.
The suspended sentence that has proved so useful that magistrates have imposed thousands of them looks doomed, as I wrote last year, so one of the few really useful bits of the 2003 Act will be dropped. I suppose we should be grateful that we even got to try it - Custody Plus was dropped before implementation (but after thousands of people had been trained on it).
I can only quote Sir Richard Mottram, the senior civil servant who said:-

"We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department's fucked. It's been the biggest cock-up ever and we're all completely fucked."

Spot on, Sir Richard, spot on.

Here is the Times leader.

Law In Action - 21st Century Style

According to the BBC two girls were given Fixed Penalty tickets for chalking on the pavement. There's two Offences Brought To Justice for the Home Office stats, and two Sanction Detections for the police to claim.
But what's this? The Mayor, no less, has intervened, and the police have graciously agreed to drop the tickets. How nice of them.
That's the face of Law and Order in 2007:- a ridiculously heavy-handed intervention by the police, driven by the target culture, and an extra-judicial resolution once the papers got interested.
If your kids are into hopscotch, you'd better tell them to pack it in and take up video games if they want to avoid an ASBO.

From The Rumour Mill

The word on the street is that the CPS is currently being deluged with applications from defence solicitors who have looked at the future for their firm and decided that there isn't one. At one time the CPS was very much a second-line choice of career. Now some people are looking at Government antagonism to small law firms, and deciding that the CPS, with its bomb-proof Government pension and Civil Service conditions, is the place to be.

My Sentiment Precisely

Questions remain about whether the government is placing too much emphasis on finding criminal justice solutions to complex social and economic problems. Should the government continue to place such heavy expectations on the criminal justice system or should it be clearer about its limitations? The time is right for the government to take stock and reflect on what the criminal justice agencies can realistically achieve in reducing crime and increasing public safety and on what the appropriate level of resourcing should be.

The above is an extract from this academic report.

More Good Sense From The Lord Chief

Lord Phillips has recently made a speech to a Probation conference and it is well worth a look. The Guardian reports on it here.
Reading between the lines of his measured remarks it is not hard to sense the frustration felt by the senior judiciary (as well as a few of us down at the judicial coalface) at the near-reckless way in which the Government has forced through changes that should properly have taken much more time and involved much more thought that they have been given. There are real and present dangers and conflicts in the rushed implementation of the Ministry of Justice, and the damned thing opens for business next week. Last Christmas none of us knew anything about it. You wouldn't reorganise a corner shop in such a hurried way.
The prison crisis is real and is not going to go away. The 8000 new places that are planned will not even remotely keep pace with the increase in numbers, because on top of a marked increase in sentence lengths we have the still-to-be-guessed at impact of indeterminate IPP sentences. Not only will these sentences lead to thousands of offenders being kept behind bars for far longer than would have been the case in the past, but it is a near-certainty that there will be insufficient resources to perform the risk assessments that must precede the decision to release. As a result many offenders will rot in prison for years while the bureaucratic wheels creak round. The LCJ's speech also refers to returns to prison following breach of licence - another policy brought in with seemingly no thought as to resources.
Lord Phillips is doing a good job but it is not too hard to see the pressures that he is under.

Bunny Boiler

Most cases seen by magistrates are the same old stuff, but sometimes a run-of-the-mill offence on the sheet turns out a bit differently, just like this one that I saw a while ago.
Criminal Damage is an everyday sort of allegation, although this one was a bit unusual in that there were two separate charges amounting to just under £5000 each. This is where the old magistrate's whiskers start to twitch - up to £5000 is summary only (i.e must be tried by magistrates) whereas £5001 and upwards is either-way and may be sent to the Crown Court.
Swift guilty pleas followed identification of the defendant, a tidy but red-eyed lady of a certain age. Her demeanour and her address in a salubrious part of Berkshire led to a lack of surprise when she was revealed to have no previous convictions in her forty-ahem years.
As the facts unfolded to the bench we heard that this was a lady who had engaged in an affair with a younger man who was married. Passions evidenced themselves in the usual manner, but eventually our lady's young lover decided to call it a day. I will draw a curtain over the steamy and passionate interlude that we went on to hear about, but the upshot was that, scorned and cast aside, she made her way to lover-boy's semi-detached and otherwise calm menage where she attempted to speak to him. He laid low, as many of us might have done, and may well have been relieved when he heard her car start up and drive off. Two minutes later, however, car and driver returned, and rammed lover-boy's car so hard that it finished up part way in to his kitchen. The mobile battering ram was, surprisingly, still driveable, and the lady in the case drove away after taking time to hurl various bits of Volvo through her by now decidedly ex-lover's window.
The damage to the victim's car and house was charged separately, and that's why we suspected that the CPS had deliberately left us an easy way out. There could not be any sense in troubling the Crown Court with this lot. We accepted jurisdiction, ordered her to pay for the damage and the Crown's costs and gave her a Conditional Discharge for twelve months. I then went on to ask her lawyer about the payment of compensation and heard that it had all been paid six weeks ago. Receipts were in court.
She had never been in court before and I am as sure as I can be that she will never trouble us again. Damage caused, damage paid for, seems fair enough to me.

Only Connect

Not many countries do irony like we English, and France (my favourite place to visit)could do with a bit sometimes. In the hypermarket yesterday we had to purchase bags because they have stopped giving them away. Green: fine by me. Saves a bit of energy and all that. Earlier we drove by a delightful quayside strip where we had dined the previous evening. Every single restaurant had a Terrasse Chauffée, usually by means of gas-fired heaters that delivered most of their heat to the atmosphere. On Friday we passed the oil complexes at the mouth of the Seine and saw a gas flare that was a good fifteen feet high. 10/10 for the bags, guys - now how about having a look at those restaurants and that refinery?

Cet Animal Est Tres Méchant............

This is something I had not seen before, quoted by the blogging doctor. The main lesson here is that an impartial and above all independent Judge is the long-stop to bureaucratic mismanagement and bullying. And it isn't hard to see how irritated some politicians are by the independent judiciary, and why they want to tie its hands

The Insolence of Office

I have just come back from a short break across the Channel. At Dover yesterday we queued for UK immigration checks and our passports were scanned into a computer. One of our party had a temporary non-UK passport valid for a month, that expired on the 30th April. Handing our passports back the Immigration Officer said: "You shouldn't really be travelling on this on its day of expiry. Will you remember that in future?" My friend politely took back his passport and we drove off to the ferry.
Now just a minute:- the passport was valid when presented, having about eight hours' validity remaining. The journey was scheduled to take less than two hours. So by what right does a public servant tell a traveller not to use a perfectly valid document? All right, it was a small incident and nobody was hurt. The officer was polite enough, but exceeded her powers, something that she had probably been told to do by her superiors.
This, dear reader, is the world into which we are blindly stumbling as the rule of law is encroached upon by the rule of administrative fiat. This isn't about security, it's about a casual abuse of power. A few years after I was born there took place what was described as a "bonfire of controls". I fear that by the time that I die England will be considerably less free than it was on the day I was born. Nobody ever threatened my granny with a fine for putting her dustbin out early.

Later:-
Maitre Éolas has blogged about arrogant and unfair practices in the USA and in France. His piece is here. I'm afraid it's in French, but the message is that terrorism has become the all-purpose excuse for casual abuse of the citizen's rights