We thus have the theoretical pantomime of a private prosecutor falsely accusing an innocent person of a crime, bringing a case to trial, losing and walking away financially restituted, while the innocent, victorious defendant is forced to sell his home to pay the cost of his acquittal. And the life savings that you have exhausted in the process of defending yourself will not be refunded.
You can be found not guilty of any criminal offence. You can be refused legal aid and forced to pay privately. In a series of High Court decisions from 2006 onwards, cherished totems of the cunning defence lawyer were demolished one by one, held to be contrary to the spirit and letter of the New World Order. The defendant was entitled to say nothing, do nothing, and simply wait until the trial to see if there was a chink in the prosecution chainmail through which a cunning solicitor or barrister could fire a silver bullet. It can’t be fair, on the most fundamental level, that the state can sweep in, turn your life upside down and waltz out again, like a remorseless, localized tornado, without so much as an apology.īack in the mid- to late twentieth century, the burden of proof was not merely sacrosanct but absolute. The time spent on remand was something he was just expected to aceept, forgive and forget. The jury did not accept Lori’s claims, and Rio was found not guilty on every count. And, among this number, as it happened, was Rio. Nearly 15 per cent of remanded prisoners are acquitted or not proceeded against. This is the position in which roughly one in seven remanded defedants – over 67,000 people in 2016 – find themselves.
And, try as I might, I cannot accept that the arguments in favour withstand the slightest scrutiny. This hangover of thirteenth-century parochial peace-keeping, far from being gently put out to pasture, is re-engineered as our turbocharged, armoured vehicle of justice for the new millennium. Magistrates, and the quality of justice that their courts engender, are very much The Future. In twenty-first-century criminal litigation where liberty is on the line, matters of law, not just fact, are decided by volunteers armed with absolutely no formal legal knowledge or training
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