A deficit of understanding - how prevalent is this?

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

is there any dispute or lack of evidence that she took the points for her then husband? and further must have expected to not have to face a prosecution for this at the time of her doing this ...
this piece from Oct 2011 is quite telling as to her independence of will ....

and one wonders quite why she did not want to talk about the points since she had already done so with the Times by March of that year

The jury was told of an email exchange dating from March 1 2011 between Pryce and Sunday Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott in which they discussed how to publicise the points affair.

here

scorned huh

[french frank]

I posted this before but it's got lost somewhere, and will bear being posted again.

Ah, my thoughts too. One would have to ask why precisely it was then thought that only wives should be able to use this defence. Why it was the fact that only the legal marriage of a man and woman should make the defence available to the woman (when many partnerships nowadays are of alternative forms not involving marriage at all). According to Harry Mount in the Telegraph most of these jurors looked 'under the age of 30' so again (if true) this might provoke questions in the minds of people born after 1980.

[Nick Armstrong]

One would have to ask why precisely it was then thought that only wives should be able to use this defence

Quite!

If the law says that, then the law, Madam, is a ass!!!

(Just ask Flay! )

[jean]

is there any dispute or lack of evidence that she took the points for her then husband?

There's no dispute because he's pleaded guilty.

...and further must have expected to not have to face a prosecution for this at the time of her doing this ...

She wouldn't have expected to face a prosecution because, at the time, she had no intention of telling the truth about what happened.

Years later, after his affair was revealed and he left her, she was so consumed with rage and the desire for revenge that (I speculate) she didn't care what happened to her.

[french frank]

Quite!

If the law says that, then the law, Madam, is a ass!!!

(Just ask Flay! )

Even Rumpole kowtowed to SWMBO ...

[Nick Armstrong]

Even Rumpole kowtowed to SWMBO ...

Precisely!

[amateur51]

Quite!

If the law says that, then the law, Madam, is a ass!!!

(Just ask Flay! )

I have just enjoyed a pint of Conwy Ale at Wetherspoons Metropolitan Bar in Baker Street so I may not have quite sufficient chalk on my cue (as it were) but in 1922 was not a wife seen as her husband's property, property who could neither claim rape by her husband nor could she testify against her husband?

I concede that I may well have got this wrong, but ...

[Barbirollians]

Caliban I think the reference to 1922 is the last time the common law presumption was relied on . There have ,however, been very few reported cases since - six apparently on the defence .

The question from the jury would have been relevant had Vicki Pryce raised a defence that she felt obliged to sign by reason of her wedding vows but she didn't - unsurprisingly.

[jean]

Quite an interesting discussion here:


...I suspect it is an interesting case of "unintended consequences".
By the looks of it, it was a common law defence that the 1925 Act
intended to weaken - however by codifying in statute the part of the
defence that remained, it ossified a legal rule that would otherwise
probably have been swept away by judges by now...

[Barbirollians]

Quite an interesting discussion here:


...I suspect it is an interesting case of "unintended consequences".
By the looks of it, it was a common law defence that the 1925 Act
intended to weaken - however by codifying in statute the part of the
defence that remained, it ossified a legal rule that would otherwise
probably have been swept away by judges by now...

I think that is very unlikely - the criminal courts have been very loath to remove protections that had been developed at common law .

For example it has required statute to remove (a) corroboration requirements and (b) the rule that a wife was not competent to give evidence against her husband .

The only case I can recall was when in the 1990s the Court of Appeal reversed the long believed and utterly offensive presumption that a husband could not rape his wife . They did so ,however, by demonstrating that this had never really been the law at all and that the cases that had held this to be the case was wrong and by the interpretation given to the Sexual Offences Act 1956 .

That simply would not have been open to the courts to remove the defence of marital coercion.

[Julien Sorel]

I have just enjoyed a pint of Conwy Ale at Wetherspoons Metropolitan Bar in Baker Street so I may not have quite sufficient chalk on my cue (as it were) but in 1922 was not a wife seen as her husband's property, property who could neither claim rape by her husband nor could she testify against her husband?

I concede that I may well have got this wrong, but ...

Not as late as 1922, no. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture

(Given the unusual character of the defence's case Mr Justice Pelmet told the jury that he would accept a verdict arrived at by "best of five, heads or tails, toss of a coin." However, he told the jury that "he could in law not direct them as to which coin theretofore they were to use, nor which significance appertaining to guilt or the contrary thereof being not guilty should be attributed to the head or the tail notwithstanding." On being asked by the jury if he was "feeling alright?" Mr Justice Pelmet replied "I am not allowed to reply to that question. Never have I been asked such a question in the 30 or so years etc. etc.")

[Flosshilde]

Presumably it would be frowned at if the jury simply said 'we haven't the foggiest. Because we have nothing tangible to go on"?

Which is basically what they did. They asked questions which they presumably hoped would clarify things; the judge rolled his eyes & heaved a sigh & said they could deliver a majority verdict if they couldn't deliver a unanimous one; the jury came back & said they couldn't do that, so the judge dismissed them/it. Juries have been dismissed in the past because they couldn't deliver a verdict, on possibly easier cases (ie ones that don't depend on such a nebulous concept as 'marital coercion' - a legal concept that has been recognised as being somewhat past its sell-by date & which might be rather alien to members of the jury, hence their difficulty in understanding what it is & deciding if Ms Pryce (Price?) was subject to it)

[jean]

According to Harry Mount in the Telegraph most of these jurors looked 'under the age of 30' so again (if true) this might provoke questions in the minds of people born after 1980.

Something else I wondered about, especially in the light of the seemingly-irrelevant question about religious belief, was whether a juror from a different culture might have a different concept of marriage.

I've just found this in the Daily Mail.

The DM wants to hint at an inadequate understanding of English on the part of the ten 'Afro-Caribbean or Asian' jurors.

I think it's more likely that different cultural norms were the problem.

But whether the jurors' difficulties were linguistic or cultural, the woman who framed the questions so carefully should have been given credit for that rather than being ridiculed by the judge for her pains.

(And I doubt if the jurors' failure to dress formally was a deficit of any significance at all.)


.

[Barbirollians]

Typical Daily Mail and Telegraph - Rumpole would have had firm words to say about them . Lord Devlin described the jury as the lamp that shows that freedom lives - and it is still true .

Just think of great jury decisions such as the acquittal of Clive Ponting .

[MrGongGong]

(And I doubt if the jurors' failure to dress formally was a deficit of any significance at all.)


.

I've just read this bit from the link

"It was noted during the Pryce case that many of the jurors were dressed casually and none of the men wore a shirt and tie."


which means WHAT ?
absolutely nothing at all , who on earth reads this crap let alone takes any notice of it ?