Originally posted by jean
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err.......... <blush> -
Thank you for providing the reference. I had in mind innocent until proved guilty. I specified 'in law'. 'In fact', who knows?Originally posted by aeolium View PostIt isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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Correct.Originally posted by aeolium View Post
In Scottish law, of course, it's slightly different with the additional Not Proven verdict which does tend to leave an official suspicion of guilt hanging in the air, even if the defendant is still presumed innocent until actually proven guilty!Comment
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One shouldn't get into no smoke without fire territory, of course, but it does no harm to point out the huge discrepancy in resources between the two sides (recent cuts have made these much worse):Originally posted by french frank View Post
...Somebody called it the trial of the century. That worked well enough as an indication of its scale and of the highly unusual status of some of those in the dock. But it was more accurate in another sense, that, as the weeks went by, this trial came to embody the peculiar values of this particular century – its materialism and the inequality which goes with it, the dominance of corporation over state...
...Rupert Murdoch’s money flooded that courtroom. It flowed into the defence of Rebekah Brooks, because he backed her; and to the defence of Andy Coulson, because Coulson had sued and forced him to pay. Lawyers and court reporters who spend their working lives at the Old Bailey agreed they had never seen anything like it, this multimillion-pound Rolls-Royce engine purring through the proceedings. Soon we found ourselves watching the power of the private purse knocking six bells out of the underfunded public sector...
...In the background, for sure, there was a huge publicly funded police inquiry, forced by the stench of past failure to investigate thoroughly the crime which had been ignored and concealed for so long. But when it came to handling the police evidence in court, Brooks and Coulson had squads of senior partners, junior solicitors and paralegals, as well as a highly efficient team monitoring all news and social media. The cost to Murdoch ran into millions. Against that, the Crown Prosecution Service had only one full-time solicitor attached to the trial and one admin assistant. They worked assiduously. One prosecution source said it was surprising they had not simply collapsed under the strain. The effect was clear.
Defence barristers would pause, turn and find a solicitor to feed them information while crown counsel often found an empty seat. The defence produced neatly laminated bundles of evidence, while the crown hastily photocopied material into files which sometimes proved to be incomplete.
Towards the end of the trial, Edis decided the jurors needed an electronic index to be installed on a computer in the jury room to help them find their way through the avalanche of paperwork which had descended on them. With the CPS struggling for cash, Edis offered to pay for it out of his own pocket, and, in the absence of CPS manpower, two junior crown counsels had to create the index themselves. Over and again, the defence teams had the resources to find some helpful stick with which to beat a potentially dangerous witness – a misremembered date, a forgotten detail, even on one occasion the fact that the witness had once had coffee with Nick Davies from the Guardian. So they were able to create complication, confusion, doubt...Comment
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Thanks for preroducing that, jean. The full article is headed "Phone hacking trial was officially about crime, but in reality it was about power", summing up the issue well.Comment
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There is, of course, likely to be a further trial, so it's not quite 'open season' yet, but my reaction to that is that with the NotW already closed, Coulson was expendable, especially as RM had no particular interest in saving Cameron's scalp. Brooks, on the other hand, his protégée, stood a chance of acquittal, and that mattered to him.
At least Cameron doesn't have the additional headache of the tweeting UnMensch on the Tory side of the House any more. (Pity about Juncker, though: not hs most glorious week in office).It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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yes I see now the case against her was very weak - I had merely been thinking back to this very brief exchangeOriginally posted by french frank View Post
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There did appear to be a bit of confusion: Coulson specified 'within the law' but whether there were any circumstances at all in which it would be within the law was not pursued. On reflection, I can't think that there would ('Just for your time and trouble, old chap.')
:-)It isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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That piece of evidence was never put before the jury. The Guardian article I linked to earlier explains:
However, the jury was not...shown Brooks’s famous evidence to that committee in March 2003 when she said that her journalists had paid police for information in the past. Select committee evidence is not admissible in court because of rules around parliamentary privilege.Comment
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Nevertheless, one supposes that that same question could have been put to her at the trial.Originally posted by jean View PostComment
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I'm sure it was - but all she had to do was say No.Comment
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Wouldnt that either be perjury, or proof that she lied to the select committee?Originally posted by jean View PostI will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I am not a number, I am a free man.Comment
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I guess so, but there's no penalty for lying to a select committee, is there?Comment
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