Fuck you, David Blunkett

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Just fuck off before you destroy the rule of law any more.

And if I see one more idiot claim that the criminal justice system is ‘weighted in favour of the criminal’, then I might just explode [*]. It’s weighted in favour of the *defendant*, who *may or may not* be the criminal. Even if he’s done it before.

Although the people who deserve the biggest kicking are the ones who say ‘of course their convictions should be disclosed, they shouldn’t have been let out in the first place’. That isn’t the fucking point, unless you also favour random strangers abducting ex-cons in the streets and torturing them to death.

Relatedly, I’d like to ban the phrase ‘to take the law into one’s own hands’. No, you didn’t ‘take the law into your own hands’, you committed a crime because you judged your own case to be more important than the law itself, you arrogant selfish scumbag. In my world, vigilanteism would be the most strictly punished crime, and anyone who romanticised it would get their legs broken.

After due judicial process, of course.

[*] Not with a fetching dynamite belt round my waist at a Society Of Right Wing Bigots meeting, tempting though it might be.

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8 thoughts on “Fuck you, David Blunkett”

  2. I can’t believe they’ve actually done this (well, I’ll feign shock). They should give everyone a black sticker on a report card for each conviction and have people hand it in to juries at the start of their trials, to save time. Innocent till proven guilty except where there’s a presumption of guilt.

  4. I’m thinking of a recent case in the Netherlands where two small children were molested and one was murdered. The person who found the two turned out to have a prior sex offense conviction and was quickly convicted and put away for a long time, even though he didn’t match the description given by the surviving victim. Then 18 months later a man who did match the description turned himself in. I’d google for reports if I could think of a specific name or place that was mentioned at that time.

    Anyway, the true culprit walked free for 18 months because the law and the judiciary pounced on a witness’s prior record. Yay for keeping our children safe, etc. etc. Lucky we don’t have the death penalty here.

  5. When I did jury service, we ended up finding the guy guilty. Immediately afterwards, we discovered his previous track record of similar crimes, and felt relieved that we’d almost certainly got it right – because it wasn’t a 100% open-and-shut case, and the whole experience really rammed home how "beyond reasonable doubt" doesn’t actually mean "totally and absolutely certain".

    But what would have happened if we’d been told his track record in advance? Well, the verdict would still have been the same, no question – but I’m willing to bet we’d have spent a lot less time than four-and-a-half hours discussing it. But it was precisely because we took that time, painstakingly sifting through the evidence and matching it to multiple witness testimonies, that we could say with a clear conscience that we sincerely believed we’d got it right in <I>this particular case</I>.

    And that’s the only thing that matters. True, we’d have put away a pretty unpleasant character come what may, but, as Reinder says, that’s not good enough: the victims of this specific case needed justice done too. And I’m not convinced that this would have been the case under these new proposals.

  7. "Relatedly, I’d like to ban the phrase ‘to take the law into one’s own hands’. No, you didn’t ‘take the law into your own hands’, you committed a crime because you judged your own case to be more important than the law itself, you arrogant selfish scumbag. In my world, vigilanteism would be the most strictly punished crime, and anyone who romanticised it would get their legs broken. "
    OK, so who is going to do the leg breaking? Can you even spell ‘irony’?

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