Blair says 'decent majority' must have justice - Law - Times Online

Like so much of what this meretricious politician says, this sounds fine - perhaps even reasonable. "Balance" is a good thing, so a "rebalancing' must be positive, right? We are in the 21st Century, so anything from previous centuries must be old-fashioned, right? Old-fashioned things like "innocent until proven guilty", for example?

"Criminals" don't deserve our sympathy, but an accused person in court is not a criminal; he or she is a suspected criminal. It's not the same thing at all. We all have the choice as to whether to commit crimes. We don't have the choice as to whether we are suspected of them. The accused in the dock could be any of us, at any time.

I only spent a short time as a criminal defence lawyer, but it was long enough even for a naieve young man to detect that policemen and prosecutors are human and therefore fallible. Many accused people should never have been in court in the first place, so flimsy was the case against them. If people are acquitted for lack of evidence, it's not the courts that are at fault. Perhaps it is the way that the bulk of police time is spent providing the government with statistics, rather than gathering evidence? Perhaps the Government might like to consider getting the army of Home Office fuckwits bureaucrats off the backs of police constables?

I blogged about the Stagg case yesterday. That hapless loser was the victim of a witch-hunt. The dismissal of his case was presented as just the sort of "injustice" that Blair was speaking about today. But he was innocent. And it took a brave judge, fearlessly independent, to protect him from the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the tabloid editors and the rest of the brainless mob baying for his innocent blood.

Whatever happened to the wisdom and kindness of "There, but for the grace of God, go I"?

Blair says 'decent majority' must have justice - Law - Times Online