A Proper Charlie

I used to think of Charles Falconer as a merely ridiculous figure. Perhaps he has changed, but it is now quite clear that he is a monster. In the last few days alone, he has given us assisted suicide explicitly for material poverty, and now the abolition of trial by jury.

As I had been expecting, judges are coming out in favour of juries. Judges are public figures, yet in that capacity they are to determine guilt of the kinds of charges that were currently tried by jurors who, as such, very definitely were not.

What switch in the brain will a judge be expected to press in order to erase the evidence that that same judge would hitherto have ruled inadmissible? Crown Court judges did not sign up for this. This was not the job for which they applied. But killing people was not the job for which doctors applied, either.