"I am hereby submitting a Freedom of Information Request for the details of all sentences handed down to newly convicted defendants aged 18 during February 2016."
The very polite reply has come far earlier than I expected, saying that I could not be given this information, since it would be appearing on the Ministry of Justice's website as a matter of routine in 2017.
That provides long enough for even the slowest of well-paid hacks to pay attention to the matter of the sentences handed down to other 18-year-olds in the month that Andrew "Picard" Boeckman's 10-month sentence was suspended for 18 months.
Plus a pocket money fine towards the prosecution's costs, effectively an insult to the taxpayer. Nothing under the Proceeds of Crime Act. Not even a requirement to sign the Sex Offenders Register. Read that last part over again.
He was even tried under his mother's maiden name, in order to protect the reputation of his father's law firm. How is that legal?
An immensely privileged youth, legally an adult, was not even required to give his real name at his trial, nor to sign the Sex Offenders Register upon his conviction. He was not given any kind of custodial sentence.
Yet he had made and distributed real-life images that included the rape of a two-year-old by a pack of dogs.
This time next year, we shall find out what the courts regarded as more serious, and to what extent, on the part of his peers.
Plus a pocket money fine towards the prosecution's costs, effectively an insult to the taxpayer. Nothing under the Proceeds of Crime Act. Not even a requirement to sign the Sex Offenders Register. Read that last part over again.
He was even tried under his mother's maiden name, in order to protect the reputation of his father's law firm. How is that legal?
An immensely privileged youth, legally an adult, was not even required to give his real name at his trial, nor to sign the Sex Offenders Register upon his conviction. He was not given any kind of custodial sentence.
Yet he had made and distributed real-life images that included the rape of a two-year-old by a pack of dogs.
This time next year, we shall find out what the courts regarded as more serious, and to what extent, on the part of his peers.
You are a true working-class and BAME warrior, Comrade. We salute you.
ReplyDeleteI thought that I was middle-class until I went to university; here in my predominately, although by no means entirely, middle-class home town, everyone still thinks that I am.
DeleteAnd I hardly thought about being mixed-race until the Labour Party right here in that home town refused to have me as a District Council candidate because I was a "mulatto", the term used by the man whom it preferred instead, and who was at the time employed by the then Government Chief Whip.
But if people in a position to make an issue of it insist that I am a pleb and a n*gger, then I suppose that that is what I am. And they have done. So I am.