If you are acquitted, or if your conviction is overturned on appeal, then the Crown Prosecution Service ought to be liable for your entire costs that had not already been met by Legal Aid.
Just as there must be no reversal of the burden of proof or abolition of the right to conduct one’s own defence in rape cases, changes frequently demanded by certain campaigners, so there must be no extension of anonymity to adult defendants.
Just as there must be no reversal of the burden of proof or abolition of the right to conduct one’s own defence in rape cases, changes frequently demanded by certain campaigners, so there must be no extension of anonymity to adult defendants.
Rather, there should be no anonymity for adult accusers, either. We either have an open system of justice, or we do not.
The specific offence of rape serves only to keep on the streets people who should certainly be taken out of circulation.
Instead, we need to replace the offences of sexual assault, serious sexual assault and rape with an aggravating circumstance to the ordinary categories of assault, enabling the maximum sentences to be doubled.
That way, those poor women with broken bones and worse, whose assailants were never convicted of anything, really would have received justice.
But can anyone explain to me how the conviction rate for rape is demonstrably wrong? What, exactly, would be the correct rate? And why, exactly?
That a woman has had a most unpleasant experience of this kind, the far greater likelihood of which is a direct consequence of the unquestionable Sexual Revolution, does not necessarily mean that she has experienced the offence of rape as the law defines it.
Either that, or the real scandal is that there are so few prosecutions for what is clearly very widespread perjury, attempting to pervert the course of justice, and making false statements to the Police.
Not that those two possibilities are mutually exclusive.
The High Court in Australia has overturned a 100 year old precedent in NSW which prevented a litigant suing police for malicious prosecution. Police & prosecution will need to be very careful from now on as the first case, a woman falsely jailed for attempted murder is expected to be settled for tens of millions$$.
ReplyDeleteHopefully this may spread.
You should have been in Parliament since 2005.
ReplyDeleteViews like this would get you debarred from a Cabinet position in any Parliamentary party.
ReplyDeleteJohn Redwood said something similar about rape in 2009-but he had already destroyed any hopes of ever returning to the front bench years earlier.
But then again, no Cabinet Minister in any of Labour, the Lib Dems or, increasingly, the Tories, could ever be allowed to express a morally conservative view today.
Tory Cabinet Ministers did vote against gay marriage in the last year.
But they were the only front benchers to do so.
I was not aware that I was on course for a Cabinet position in any parliamentary party.
ReplyDelete