I’m not talking about matters Irish. I’m talking about the competence of the investigating police, and what they seem to consider reasonable grounds for suspicion. Do you not think the policy of investigating everyone based on their ethnicity contrasts rather disturbingly with the lack of investigation of a specific individual with an actual history of suspicious behaviour?
Do I think screening for potential Irish bombers requires a different approach to appointing school caretakers ? Yes, I probably do.
Do I think screening in either area is what it should be (in various respects) ? No, I don’t.
Back to subject.
Well obviously Mangetout does know better. Unless you’re saying that that single juror was correct and everyone else is wrong?
Unfortunately, putting someone on a job full-time for six weeks is no guarantee that they’ll be any good at it. And in this case they appear to have been extremely bad at it.
I suspect that the single juror will be having second thoughts now that Huntley’s past record has been revealed.
The single juror did what he/she was supposed to do; by using their judgement, make the best possible decision they can with all the information available to them at that point – “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad” doesn’t come into it, you just make a judgement the best you can. Sure, that juror may change his/her mind knowing what we now all know (after the verdict was given) . . . but that’s hindsight . . .
In fact the very term “beyond all reasonable doubt” itself requires a subjective judgement; one person’s view of where that particular line is crossed will always be slightly different to anothers’. As is the way we accept explanations from other people, some are more accepting/forgiving that others . . . a jury is representative, that’s all. It ain’t a science, it ain’t a test or examination.
But that’s all the system asks of them, and that juror did his/her job just as the other eleven did. They did, and in the end - hey, the system worked.
One nasty issue raised by this case is how difficult it is to get a conviction for a sex attack in the UK. It seems unlikely the previous charges against Huntley are mere coincidence, but he got away with them. In the Gary Glitter case it was the kiddie porn on his computer that did for him, previous charges of raping minors got thrown out. The conviction rate is incredibly low to the point (IIRC) where victims are often advised not to bother going to court (where their sexual history will be paraded and/or they will be subjected to attacks on their integrity, honesty etc to get them to break down in court - but the accused will be protected from any such treatment - after all they might be guilty, and we can’t have criminals suffering in the same way as ordinary folk, can we?)
THere is one consolation, which is that life on Rule 43 is no picnic at all.
Frankly I would rather be hanged.
I thought about this and while it seems like a very sensible thing to do, it can’t possibly happen. It would be wide open for all manner of abuses.
You could have no evidence whatsoever against someone you didn’t like but press charges just to see them get one of these hypothetical "nearly " criminal records.
You could then pay someone else to accuse the same guy of the same thing. Bingo, he is a repeat offender with no convictions and has two nearly charges on his record.
It couldn’t possibly work.
What does strike me here, though is that phrase you often see on TV dramas:
“Please press charges or he’ll do it to someone else”
Many many pervs get away with this type of thing because the cases are dropped due to the child being unwilling to go through with it or the mother/father deciding that they can’t put their own child through the trauma of a court case.
Before anyone jumps on my back, I’m not saying that the children or the parents in this or any other instance are wrong to drop the charges, no way, no how.
I am just saying that the perverted bastards who prey on children do it for a myriad of pervy reasons, but this particular aspect of their nature is one of the most chilling -
a) no one will believe this child
b) this child’s parent won’t put him/her through court
so the pervy deviant gets away with it.
Oh, and ruadh, just to help you down of that great big high horse you are on at the moment, part a) of this strategy was used to enormous effect in…Gasp…Ireland for many many long years.
Yeah, this is as relevant to the discussion at hand as your remark that the police would have handled Huntley differently if he was Irish.
As in - completely, totally and utterly irrelevant in every detail.
There are perverts and miscarriages of justice in every country in the world. The British judiciary does not exist for the express purpose of locking up innocent Irish people.
It locks up plenty of innocent British people as well, you know. Ask Mrs Patel.
Ask Mrs Canning.
Did I say that I know better?
No.
I said “I find it difficult to understand…”
Nice strawman. If the Guardian article had referred to British people who happened to be black, Muslim or of Asian descent I would have said the same thing. You are free to consider it irrelevant, but kindly do not put words in my mouth.
The, I’m sorry. Please advise on what basis you did “find it difficult” because the clear inference (to me) is that the juror was wrong, in your judgement - I see no other reading ?
Read the words; in view of the evidence to which we now have access (and I’m not counting Huntley’s past record as a sexual predator), I find it hard to understand how a juror could be in doubt as to his guilt.
Huntley’s rediculous defence that young girls kept dying by accident around him (whoops! there goes another one) would alone have been enough for me to find him guilty.
Which everyone appears to agree was poor.
And their best would appear to have been at variance with all the others on the jury and practically every other follower of the trial.
And this juror’s best was not that great, as their judgement was that they were unconvinced of his guilt, despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise.
Of course.
And we question this juror’s subjective judgement.
Well it’s fortunate that 6 others in the jury didn’t do their job to the same standard, isn’t it? Cos that would be the system working too.
I’m not arguing with your description of the jury system, or saying the system is flawed. But we certainly can question exactly what this juror was thinking.
I’ve just finished watching a lengthy BBC documentary in which more of the evidence was presented; parts of the evidence were in direct contradiction to Huntley’s (revised) story (for example - no trace of blood on the girls’ clothing - an impossible situation if one of them had a nosebleed and then fell into a bath full of water).
My perplexity is heightened as to how a juror could see all this and still arrive at a non-guilty verdict. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the story about that though.
That’s true, although in this case the juror seems to have set the bar remarkably high, so, like Mangetout I find it difficult to understand his/her reaching that verdict.
Like you say though, the jury system did it’s job…
I don’t agree. I envisage that this angle will be fully investigated by our press. It’s too interesting for them to ignore.
Please give it a rest,ruadh . This is no place for your crusade against the UK.
V
Sure, it’s tempting to think there was just one thing that didn’t quite make enough sense for that one juror. It doesn’t have to be that the juror didn’t believe Huntley killed them, it could be that the juror might have been thinking ‘the prosecution haven’t – in my view – satisfied the burden of proof that is on them by proving their case beyond all reasonable doubt’ and, in a literal sense, that has to be correct; the only way to convict Huntley was to ignore his explanation and to assume an alternative, seemingly more plausible set of events.
But those alternative events were never ‘proven’ in the legal sense; the Jury imputed an alternative scenario to the manner of the girls’ death. It’s fine – they can do whatever they like, especially as no one else was present at the time - but, maybe, in one person’s view, that was outside the legal terms by which they were required to determine the questions.
Bottom line, the prosecution couldn’t, literally, prove its case and the Jury had to assume a scenario. Was the juror in question was a legal literalist . . . ?
I can see your point, but the circumstatial evidence against Huntley was overwhelming. I read/skimmed the majority of the trial transcripts on the Sky News website and it seemed to me that that his version of events was a bizarre concoction to fit round the evidence against him. I’m not knocking the juror in question, it’s a shame Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley, Stefan Kitschko etc. didn’t have one like him/her at their trials…
I would be happy to give it a rest but as some people here seem determined to portray my comments as having more sinister motives than they do, please allow me to point out that I wasn’t the one initially bringing up the fact that the Humberside Police has their head up their arse when it comes to investigating potential suspects, I simply provided another example of it.
BTW, if anybody else wants to have a go at me over this would you open another thread for it? Of all things this is surely not the place for …