Ministers need to act on rape case failures
Widdecombe
YET again another young man, Liam Allan, is acquitted of rape after the agony of years on police bail. Yet the evidence showing the young woman to have been lying through her teeth was there in police files all along.
Mr Allan owes his deliverance to the efforts of a barrister, Julia Smart, and the determination of a conscientious prosecutor, Jerry Hayes. Given the necessary material by the police only after the case had begun and after the girl had given her evidence, Ms Smart sat up half the night trawling through 40,000 text messages.
Mr Allan was lucky. My website regularly attracts letters not only from people who say the police were not interested in any possibility of innocence in rape and sexual assault cases but from those who also say that their barristers did a poor job. One correspondent says the barrister was observed dozing off, another that there was evidence in text messages which the barrister shrugged off. They should have had Ms Smart.
The young woman will almost certainly escape prosecution. Alison Saunders, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, is so focused on conviction rates that she has lost sight of the much greater imperative of justice to be impartial. Yet again I say she should resign.
Alarmingly, it is claimed that failure to disclose evidence to the defence is rife. Mr Allan is therefore right to sue. Indeed it is the only language the police and CPS will understand and if faced with enough claims for compensation they may at last change their ways. Yet there is another route. David Lidington, the Minister for Justice, is a bright chap and he needs to make a speech about justice being blind and apolitical at all times and in all cases, citing some of the rape case failures as evidence of where it has not measured up to such criteria. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, is regrettably politically correct but surely even she can see that the police have gone too far in favouring the woman in allegations of sexual assault and rape. She too should make a major speech. Better still both should make statements to the House of Commons saying they are concerned by recent developments and have emphasised the basic requirements of justice to those responsible for implementing it. A strong lead from government is now an urgent necessity.
A pig just flew past my window. JUSTIN WELBY, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has an odd notion of Christian forgiveness, having sacked one of his predecessors, George Carey, from an honorary position because of mistakes he made 24 years ago.
Hmm. Given St Paul’s record of persecuting Christians before his conversion, it is as well Archbishop Welby was not running the early church. He would never have let him in. THERE is much excoriation of the Conservative rebels who defeated Theresa May’s Brexit proposals in the House of Commons. But given that utter sell-out over Northern Ireland, which already ties us indefinitely to both the single market and the customs union in the absence of any agreement on the border, I don’t know why they bothered.