Courting Couple

As the American-backed President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon appoints Nawaf Salam as Prime Minister, Salam is succeeded as President of the International Court of Justice by Julia Sebutinde, its only permanent judge to vote against all provisional measures against Israel.

And as Fr Timothy Gardner pleads guilty at Newcastle Crown Court, he does so for the same reason as he did 11 years ago, namely because he just could not take it anymore. This time, he was supposed to have been tried last July. If he had pleaded not guilty today, then when would he ever have faced a jury? Add to that the fact that since Tony Blair's infamous Criminal Justice Act 2003, which also admitted hearsay evidence, removed the protection against double jeopardy, and provided for Crown Court trials by a judge without a jury (the first ever such resulted in a life sentence), effectively made it possible to be convicted of having previously been convicted.

Like my own guilty plea, the biggest regret of my life, Fr Gardner's sets the seal on every lurid allegation made by his accusers, which are then dutifully regurgitated and even embellished by the media. In my case, and possibly in his, those were introduced in court after my plea but before my sentence, an astonishing catalogue of total falsehood that I was powerless to contest. Not that I would wish the slightest contact with those whom they formally protected, but three 10-year restraining orders were imposed on me because of this factional fiction, of which I had had no prior intimation. Where was the justice there?

Exhausted into submission, Fr Gardner has not even so much as been convicted by a jury, and I am the first to say that juries are overrated, so the latest accusations against me still have absolutely no credibility, and nor does the propensity evidence that alone secured my conviction in 2020, to breach of the suspended sentence for which I wrongly pleaded guilty in 2021, leading to my imprisonment. Fr Gardner's non-conviction was not the only thing that could have vindicated me. But it would have done so. And I have other arrows in my quiver.