Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2011

Nathalie Rothschild: Britain’s debate on rape “is demeaning to women”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

There is much sound and fury in Britain this week over some remarks by a Tory cabinet minister in a BBC interview. The leader of the opposition has demanded that he be dismissed from the government for suggesting that there are ‘other categories of rape’. Nathalie Rothschild wrote this article in response to a 2010 review of the rape law.

In 2007, Camilla Cavendish of The Times (London) found that rape allegations had jumped by 40 per cent between 2002 and 2005. While this can partly be put down to improved support for women, which facilitates the process of reporting rape, Cavendish argued that a widening official definition of rape also played a big role. Since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 came into force, the definition of rape has been expanded to include oral sex. But there has also been a profound attitude shift with roots in the second-wave feminist idea that heterosexual sex is an inherently violent and degrading act that women subject themselves to against their better judgement.

More than four out of five rape allegations are made against friends or acquaintances. As alcohol and/or drugs were involved in over half those cases, Cavendish puts this down to ‘the culture of binge drinking’. But this avoids the more complex picture. Today, various rape-awareness activists and state feminists are themselves helping to blur the boundaries between sex and rape, encouraging women to regard themselves as violated, abused and traumatised for having gone to bed with a man without thinking it through in minute detail.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 declared that consent must be ‘active, not passive’; in rape cases, consent is now taken to mean agreement rather than the absence of a refusal. So if a woman goes along with sex, but doesn’t make it explicitly clear that she is actively consenting to it, it can be deemed to be rape. The government has even moved towards ensuring that no agreement can be taken as consent if it is given under the influence of alcohol. As Cavendish pointed out: ‘In our zeal to protect women, are we going to legislate so that a drunken man is accountable for his deeds, but a drunken woman is not? Why do we encourage women to see themselves as victims?’ Absolving women who engage in sexual liaisons — whether drunk or sober — of responsibility for their actions is not liberating; it’s demeaning.

There is no doubt that forcing someone to have sex is a heinous, violent and degrading act and victims of rape should indeed be treated with dignity and respect. But in the name of protecting women, the government is insisting that rape cases be treated differently from all other crimes, while interfering with the course of justice in a way that undermines defendants’ rights and undercuts the power of juries.

May 18, 2011

Neil Davenport: The cognitive dissonance of “SlutWalk”

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

It’s possible to feel a bit sorry for Michael Sanguinetti, whose anachronistic, ill-advised, yet well-intended caution to female students at Osgoode Hall in Toronto triggered the SlutWalk phenomenon. By phrasing his advice in such a retrogressive way, he became the poster boy for all that women perceive as being wrong with the criminal justice system’s approach to solving the problem of violence against women.

However, as Neil Davenport points out, the reaction seems to be directed at the legal system and attitudes of thirty years ago, not the system of today:

The legal system, at least officially, now takes any accusation of sexual assault against women very seriously. It’s ironic that SlutWalk is supposedly exposing the ineffectiveness of a legal system at a time of high-profile sexual assault charges made against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. More than ever, law enforcers in Britain and the US are likelier to act on an accusation of assault, even if the alleged crime took place years previously.

Faced with such a gap between feminist thinking and how society actually views violence against women, the anger expressed by SlutWalk protestors and cheerleading feminists rings a bit hollow. Although the protestors are aiming to avoid being victimised on the basis of what they wear, their offence taken at one police officer’s comments suggests a willingness to claim the mantle of victimhood for themselves. In this case, women are victims of a patriarchal state that doesn’t take violence against them seriously, even though the evidence suggests that the state is all too keen to monitor and regulate any type of contact between men and women. Feminists used to have many issues on which to express genuine grievance on the unequal treatment of women in society: equal pay and employment rights, abortion rights and so on. But since many of these issues have been resolved, more or less, there seems to be an on-going search for examples of oppression to facilitate the elevation of women to the exalted status of victimhood.

It’s perhaps not helped that the frothy issue of sexual identity is at the heart of the SlutWalk debacle. Some feminists argue that the protestors are feeding into a wider ‘raunch culture’ that is having a debilitating impact on young women. The sexualisation of society, the argument goes, is pressurising more young women to make themselves available to men in order to be accepted. SlutWalk is simply buying into the old madonna/whore duality that was often cited as an example of women’s inferior status in society. Again, though, this ignores how far society’s attitudes towards sex and women have changed. Women’s greater independence in society and the depoliticisation of marriage and the nuclear family have all helped transform attitudes towards women and sex.

May 10, 2011

Superinjunctions

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

British law is already difficult enough for outsiders to suss out, but the recent use of superinjunctions to prevent even the hint that a story is being legally suppressed makes it even tougher:

The high profile are gagging, the press is losing the ability to speak, and now the Twitterati is vomiting up half-digested rumours. All the signs are that Britain is in the grip of the legal virus known as ‘injunctionitis’.

It makes for an unedifying spectacle. In between news of uprisings in the Middle East, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the marriage of Will’n’Kate, the British press has been running another set of stories about what it is forbidden from reporting. The reason for this is the increasingly problematic use of the injunction, a legal prohibition issued by a judge that prevents a particular story from being published. While these have been issued for a few years now with largely little public knowledge — especially after the use of so-called superinjunctions, which forbid people from mentioning the fact that an injunction exists — over the past year or so, the injunction in all its forms has started to make the news all by itself. Which, you’d be correct in thinking, rather defies the point.

In fact, over the past few weeks, the attempts by certain individuals to gag the press has resulted in an outbreak of calculated press indiscretion. There has been the tale of the unnamed English actor who employed the services of Helen Wood, a prostitute whose previous clients include footballer Wayne Rooney. Of course, given the injunction, Wood couldn’t do a proper bonk-and-blab about the actor, but there was enough detail there for a salacious few pages’ worth. Then there was the unnamed Premier League footballer who had allegedly been having an affair with Big Brother 7 victim/star Imogen Thomas. She has since been frequently pictured looking disconsolate in a series of fetching bikinis.

It’s bad enough when the government uses its powers to suppress public discussion of items of importance to “national security” (with the definition as loose as possible). It’s much worse when the courts are allowing private individuals and corporations to have their own version of court-imposed censorship, as there’s no possibility of it being a “national security” issue.

It has not just been the tabloids making news of the unreportable. There has also been the case of ex-Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin who took out a hyper-injunction, which absurdly forbids anyone from even talking about the subject of the injunction to the lawmakers themselves — namely, parliament. (Although, of course, someone did, hence we know about its existence if not any of the details.) And things became even crazier when a prominent member of the media, BBC journalist Andrew Marr, revealed that he himself had violated his own profession’s freedom by taking out an injunction in 2008 to hush up an infidelity. In fact, as The Times gleefully reported, there are over 30 high-profile injunctions currently in operation involving a whole heap of public figures, from footballers to politicians.

So, in at least one area, we’re back to there literally being two different kinds of law, differentiated by the wealth of the plaintiff.

May 2, 2011

Radley Balko: “He won”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:58

A distressing round-up of the lifetime achievements of the late Osama Bin Laden:

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

The list, unfortunately goes on.

Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.

April 30, 2011

“When police decide they need to make an arrest, he said, they find a way to make an arrest”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Not the finest day in Albertan justice:

Charges have been dropped against three Alberta men accused of shooting dead a pregnant wild horse and tossing its body down a hillside. For more than a year, the RCMP and the Crown were sure they had the right guys. They even charged the then-12-year-old son of Jason Nixon, one of the accused. But then, just as the trial began, the defence produced an important piece of exculpatory evidence: The horse hadn’t been shot.

The Mounties had assumed it had been. They were operating on a tip from a man named Dave Goertz. Mr. Goertz, as everyone involved in the case knew, was a crackhead and a meth addict. He reported the crime after a local group that defends Alberta’s wild horse population posted a $25,000 reward.

[. . .]

Apparently, the word of a drug addict was enough for the guardians of our justice system to arrest three innocent men and run them all the way to trial, costing them their jobs, a small fortune and untold grief.

[. . .]

The horse had been badly decomposed, apparently, by the time police found it, so determining whether it had been shot wasn’t possible. And yet, lacking critical evidence, the province proceeded with its prosecution for wilfully killing and careless use of a firearm. The three men faced a maximum of five years in prison.

This kind of thing, said defence lawyer Willie deWit, “is what happens in our system a lot of times.” When police decide they need to make an arrest, he said, they find a way to make an arrest. They ignore anything that might exculpate the accused, and seize on anything that feeds their assumptions of guilt.

November 18, 2010

Another fan of Christie Blatchford’s Helpless

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Father Raymond J. deSouza points out that the actions of the OPP in Caledonia have ended up hurting peaceful native and non-native Ontarians:

If you are pressed for time, abandon this column now and immediately read the excerpt in these section from Christie Blatchford’s new book, Helpless. In that book, she details how two-tier justice came to Caledonia, Ont., in 2006 — immunity for native Canadians; and neglect, contempt and harassment for the non-native victims of crime. It is a scandalous tale, simply told.

[. . .]

Lest anyone think that Blatchford’s book is an attack on native aspirations, consider who suffers the most when lawlessness is permitted in native communities: the natives who live there. Not enforcing the law in native communities puts out a large welcome mat for organized crime and corruption.

[. . .]

Yet Blatchford’s book is not about native issues. It’s about the failure of the provincial government and the OPP to enforce the laws — even after a judge issued an injunction to end the illegal activity. Moreover, it’s about the OPP’s abuse of power. The most disturbing pages are about Julian Fantino, then OPP commissioner and now Conservative candidate in a federal byelection, who came perilously close to using police force to restrict the liberties of a free citizen with the temerity to protest the OPP’s policy of non-enforcement in Caledonia.

I noted with disgust that the federal Conservatives had not only nominated Julian Fantino for their candidate in the byelection, but were being quite open about protecting him from questions on his conduct of the Caledonia affair. If I’d ever considered voting for a Conservative candidate in the next federal election, that alone would make me reconsider.

November 17, 2010

“My plan is to make you guys look like a bunch of assholes”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

More of Christie Blatchford’s Helpless from the National Post series of excerpts:

“We’ve been sitting there pretty much most of the morning looking for ya, just because we wanted to have a couple words with ya.” He added that police had “some concerns today for you and the safety of the community,” and “it’s our belief that if you or anybody else attempts to erect flags or ribbons directly across from Douglas Creek Estates, that it may cause a confrontation, and we can’t let that happen, and we won’t let that happen.

“We will allow you to raise flags and ribbons, just not across from the Douglas Creek Estates. Okay, and anybody that — anybody that attempts to do that, to raise those flags and ribbons in that restricted area, will be arrested for breach of the peace.”

McHale, of course, asked, “So have the natives been arrested for putting up their flags?”

“They have not,” Cowan replied.

“Why?” McHale asked. “You said ‘anyone.’ Your words were ‘Anyone who tries to put up flags will be arrested for breach of the peace.’”

“That’s today I’m talking about,” Cowan replied.

Around and around they went, with McHale pressing his point and Cowan’s only answer for it that, when natives put up their flags, it was “a long time ago.”

“And I’m not here to comment on that,” Cowan said. “I’m just telling you what our plan is today, and that’s what my purpose is.”

“Well,” McHale said, “you know what my plan is.”

“What is your plan?” Cowan asked.

“My plan is to make you guys look like a bunch of assholes,” McHale said, “and you’ve done a great job [of helping achieve that]. The media will be here, and it will be quite clear to all Canadians across this country, because they will see the native flag. The cameras will show the native flag. And you’ll be there, and your officers will be there, saying, ‘If you put up a Canadian flag, we will arrest you.’”

November 8, 2010

We’d love to talk about this First Amendment case, but we’re not allowed to

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

I sometimes wonder if there was ever any point in the US founding fathers putting that pesky Bill of Rights in place, when it’s so easy for those rights to be circumvented:

Liptak, who has seen part of the secret 10th Circuit order that keeps the amicus brief sealed, says one reason the appeals court gave for its decision is that allowing distribution of the brief would help I.J. and Reason publicly make their case that Reynolds is being persecuted for exercising her First Amendment rights. One of their goals, the Court said, “is clearly to discuss in public amici’s agenda.” Obviously, we can’t have that.

It bears emphasizing that the I.J./Reason brief is based entirely on publicly available information. It does not divulge any confidential grand jury information, protection of which is the rationale for sealing the documents related to Reynolds’ case. The only purpose served by sealing it is to make talking about the case harder.

Discouraging public dissent, of course, is how this case got started. Tanya Treadway, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Stephen and Linda Schneider, was so irked by Reynolds’ public defenses of the couple that she unsuccessfully sought a gag order telling Reynolds to shut up. Later Treadway initiated a grand jury investigation that resulted in subpoenas demanding documents related to Reynolds’ activism as head if the Pain Relief Network (PRN), including a Wichita billboard defending the Schneiders and a PRN documentary about the conflict between drug control and pain control. Those subpoenas, supposedly aimed at finding evidence of obstruction of justice, are the subject of Reynolds’ First Amendment challenge.

First there were those secret laws in the wake of 9/11, now you’ve got courts ordering information on First Amendment cases to be kept from the public. One fears to ask “what’s next” for fear that they’ll already have an authoritarian answer teed up and ready to go.

October 22, 2010

The gruesome confessions of a murder that never happened

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Roger Henry sent a link to this Australian story, which is just plain weird:

It was a macabre crime that horrified Germany: a farmer, battered to death and dismembered by his own family, his body apparently fed to his pigs and dogs.

A killing without a corpse, since all traces had been gobbled up in the farmyard.

Yesterday, thought, nine years after Rudi Rupp disappeared, a Bavarian court opened a retrial of his supposed killers after the discovery of his intact body in the River Danube. The case has sent shockwaves through the German judicial system, which since the Second World War has prided itself on its probity and professionalism.

Mr Rupp, a 52-year-old Bavarian pig farmer, allegedly returned home from the pub one autumn night in 2001 and was hit over the head with a large wooden beam by Mathias Eisenhofer, 17, the lover of Mr Rupp’s daughter Manuela, 16. He was beaten almost to death and taken to the cellar where Manuela noticed that her father’s leg was still twitching. Eisenhofer then hit the farmer’s skull with a sharp-edged hammer. Manuela joined in. Another daughter, Andrea, 15, watched, as did the farmer’s wife Hermine.

Why would they make up such a gruesome story? It doesn’t appear to make any sense. The whole thing is so weird that I’d be tempted to check that it wasn’t an early April news story.

October 7, 2010

Isn’t this a barbaric practice for a free society?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

I’m generally fine with our American neighbours, our societies are similar in so many respects, but this whole “Pledge of Allegiance” thing is something that I just don’t get. A country that theoretically prides itself on being the “home of the free” can still put you in jail for failing to recite it on command?

Danny Lampley (who clerked for me in law school), was jailed by Chancery Court Judge Littlejohn in Tupelo for failing to recite the pledge of allegiance in open court today. Danny was one of the local lawyers who represented the plaintiff in the Pontotoc school prayer case years ago, working with the ACLU and People for the American Way.

I’m informed that Danny rose and was respectful, but did not recite the pledge.

Is this just Judge Littlejohn being a prick, or does this sort of thing happen regularly? What penalty would he get for not singing the national anthem?

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

September 16, 2010

QotD: Trial By Jury

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:03

In 1850 Spooner published A Defence for Fugitive Slaves, Against the Acts of Congress on February 12, 1793 and September 18, 1850, where he argued that juries “are judges of the law, as well as the fact” and are therefore justified in nullifying federal fugitive slave laws. “No man can be punished for resisting the execution of any law,” Spooner wrote, “unless the law be so clearly constitutional, as that a jury, taken promiscuously from the mass of the people, will all agree that it is constitutional.” Today we call this radical approach “jury nullification.”

Two years later, in Trial by Jury, Spooner developed his argument in full, expertly tracing the right of jury nullification back to the Magna Carta. “It is indispensable that the people, or ‘the country,’ judge of and determine their own liberties against the government,” he wrote. “How is it possible that juries can do anything to protect the liberties of the people against the government; if they are not allowed to determine what those liberties are?” According to Spooner, it was essential to distinguish between trial by jury, which meant trial by the people, chosen by lot, and trial by government, which was an illegal usurpation of the people’s power. “If the government may decide who may, and who may not, be jurors,” he wrote, “it will of course select only its partisans, and those friendly to its measures.” Furthermore, he said, if the government had its way, it “may also question each person drawn as a juror, as to his sentiments in regard to the particular law involved in each trial…and exclude him if he be found unfavorable to the maintenance of such a law.”

Of course, that’s exactly what happens today when potential jurors who oppose the death penalty are prevented from serving on death penalty cases or when those who oppose drug prohibition are excluded from drug cases, thereby stacking the jury in the government’s favor. As Spooner presciently observed, “if the government may dictate to the jury what laws they are to enforce, it is no longer a ‘trial by the country,’ but a trial by the government.”

Damon W. Root, “Clarence Thomas’ Favorite Anarchist: The radical anti-statism of Lysander Spooner”, Reason, 2010-09-16

May 26, 2010

More on the Michael Bryant case

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:17

It’s rather surprising how strongly this Globe and Mail editorial expresses the paper’s approval of the decision not to press charges against former Ontario attorney-general Michael Bryant:

Everyone deserves justice, even a former Ontario attorney-general driving an expensive car who finds himself in an altercation with a cyclist in which the cyclist is killed. Irrespective of whatever wealth, power or connections Michael Bryant may have, he was an Everyman. Anyone might find himself in his place one day, reacting in fear and panic to a wild, unexpected aggressor, and subject afterward to police charges and condemnation by the community. When criminal charges were dropped against him yesterday, it was a good day for justice.

Much of what was publicly believed about Michael Bryant’s fatal encounter on Aug. 31, 2009, with Darcy Sheppard turns out to have been false. He did not swerve across a street and ram Mr. Sheppard into a light post or tree or mailbox. He was not speeding along at 60 to 100 kilometres an hour.

Nor were any of the terrible events that night emblematic of the problems that car drivers and cyclists have sharing the road. Mr. Sheppard was simply a man out of control. Given that he paid for his actions with his life, it may seem an unnecessary further blow that he now be publicly judged. But it is necessary, because another man, Michael Bryant, was facing up to life in prison if convicted of criminal negligence causing death. He, not Mr. Sheppard, had the power of the state lined up against him. And everything that happened proceeded inexorably as a result of Mr. Sheppard’s own actions.

Other than the initial flurry of interest in the case immediately following the incident, I didn’t follow the details. This is an excellent example of media coverage severely biased against the defendant: what little I thought I knew about the case made it seem to be an open-and-shut case of vehicular manslaughter. As the Globe editorial points out, very little of what I “knew” about the case (from the media) turns out to have been true.

April 23, 2010

QotD: Seeing the justice system through different eyes

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

By revealing how a city employee seemed to spend virtually all his time following her in a city truck, she has directed much-needed attention to city’s supervisory practices.

That’s in addition to highlighting, by explaining what it is like to be stalked, the nature of — and remedy for — a crime that can be devastating in its psychological effects, even if nothing worse happens.

De Blois, 40, who works at Youth Court, told The Gazette’s Katherine Wilton that at first she thought she could handle the situation herself. But in the months before the stalker, 49-year-old André Martel, was arrested, De Blois said she felt terrorized. She lost 23 pounds and had trouble sleeping.

Even after Martel pleaded guilty to criminal harassment and was conditionally released on bail, he continued to follow De Blois, she says. The lawyer suddenly saw the justice system through different eyes. “I can’t imagine what it must be like for a regular person who is not a lawyer, who doesn’t have contacts with a police officer or a crown prosecutor,” she said.

“Why were taxpayers subsidizing a stalker?”, Montreal Gazette, 2010-04-23

December 17, 2009

Judiciary to “fight back” against draconian Tory laws

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

It’s always nice when your secret opponents actually come out and say that they’re against you. Bob Tarantino shows how the Tories’ “draconian” penalties against criminals are opposed by the judiciary:

In the middle of an otherwise rote piece in a Toronto-area newspaper about how Stephen Harper is just too gosh-darn mean to criminals, there appeared this remarkable passage: “Judges are skilled at devising creative ways to fight back against laws they believe may skew the system. For example, Judge Cole said the elimination of two-for-one pre-trial credit has prompted judges to begin talking openly about forcing trials to be held more quickly. He said Canadian judges may also start compensating by intentionally lowering sentences: ‘That appears to have been the experience in other jurisdictions where Draconian sentencing policies have been forced upon the judiciary.’ ”

The passage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Neither Justice Cole nor the newspaper’s justice reporter, both of whom can be assumed to have at least a glancing familiarity with the role of judges in our constitutional democracy, saw anything striking in characterizing the proper task of the judiciary as “fighting back” against laws they don’t like.

Nor do they find anything striking about a judge viewing duly enacted legislation as something being “forced upon” the judiciary — as if it were the judges who were being sent to jail.

And judges won’t just be “fighting back” against Parliament — in order to make good on the threat of handing down “intentionally” lower sentences, they will need to ignore case-law precedent. Evidently, neither Parliament nor the previous decisions of judges themselves will be allowed to stand in the way of the determination of certain members of the judiciary to treat convicted criminals lightly.

It’s no surprise that certain members of the judiciary think of themselves as being better able to determine what “appropriate” punishment might be . . . after all, within the statute and case law, that’s what they’re supposed to do. It’s the expansion of that notion that they know better and don’t feel they should be bound by the letter of the law. That’s several steps too far.

December 15, 2009

Heart-warming story of the day

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

Jon sent me this heart-warming story, and I thought it best to share:

A millionaire businessman who fought back against a knife-wielding burglar was jailed for two-and-a-half years yesterday. But his attacker has been spared prison.

Munir Hussain, 53, and his family were tied up and told to lie on the floor by career criminal Waled Salem, who burst into his home with two other masked men.

Mr Hussain escaped and attacked Salem with a metal pole and a cricket bat. But yesterday it was the businessman who was starting a prison sentence for his ‘very violent revenge’.

Jailing him, Judge John Reddihough said some members of the public would think that 56-year-old Salem ‘deserved what happened to him’ and that Mr Hussain ‘should not have been prosecuted’.

But had he spared Mr Hussain jail, the judge said, the ‘rule of law’ would collapse.

He said: ‘If persons were permitted to take the law into their own hands and inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting the criminal justice system take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.’

Salem, who has previous convictions, has already been given a non-custodial sentence despite carrying out what the judge called a ‘serious and wicked’ attack.

Well, it’s nice to know that some judges carry the best interests of “society” close to their hearts. And he’s right, you know: society would indeed collapse if the courts were forced to spend their time trying and sentencing career criminals like Salem. They’re career criminals. Custodial sentences would interfere with their careers, which would be a serious infringement of their human rights. Can’t have that.

The courts, however, are well situated to send serious messages to wanton millionaires like Hussain, who need to be regularly reminded that their wealth and privilege does not give them rights over and above those enjoyed by normal non-millionaires. I have no need to remind you that non-millionaires are not allowed to defend themselves against criminals either.

So, clearly, justice is served.

In some parallel universe, anyway.

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