It was not Tony Blair who started it of course, because during the course of the past twenty-five years or more successive Governments have all had their ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ theme. The refrain from politicians has ever been, that the Law unjustly favours the guilty.
I do not propose to deal with here the issue of what constitutes a ‘just sentence’ neither raise, other than in passing, the fact that a significant majority of defendants appearing before the Court dispose of their matters by way of a guilty plea. I am concerned with the fact-finding process called ‘the trial’, that formerly scrupulously fair hearing where the Court listened to all admissible, truly probative evidence. Call me old fashioned, even a pedant (no, please do, it will make you feel so much better) but I liked the good old days when evidence depended upon a witness telling the Court about what he had heard, felt or seen when the alleged crime was committed.
I am not a complete Luddite because established forensic science, including fingerprint (and now DNA) evidence has always had an important place too. For centuries defendants, mostly innocent but some guilty, have been pronounced ‘not guilty’ because the evidence was not strong enough. The evidence of real and probative value had simply not been sufficient to convince the Court of their guilt. The ‘New Labour’ Administrations since 1997 have rapidly eroded the prospect of a defendant receiving a trial as fair as had been the case in the past, by tipping the balance of what a Court could or should hear as evidence, in favour of the prosecution (along with numerous other ‘devices’ that I do not intend to dwell upon here).
It is hard to resist the impression that people proclaiming their innocence are considered by this Government as a nuisance. The whole system is degrading into a device by which alleged miscreants are processed as efficiently and at as little cost as possible before being recorded as guilty and receiving the appropriate punishment. I am surprised that Mr Blair’s Government, the most illiberal regime for many decades, does not bite the bullet and seek to change the onus of proof in criminal matters from one of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to the ‘balance of probabilities’. Perhaps it knows that such a course would cause uproar, because the true purpose of its purported plans to ‘improve’ the criminal justice system would be laid bare. It would be seen as a tawdry means by which the prosecution process is simplified to secure more convictions at less cost, and nothing to do about the lofty ideal of improved ‘Justice’, protecting Society and ensuring that the truly guilty are punished.
This Government now seeks to browbeat and criticise Judges for being weak on Crime. The Judges are the mere whipping boys for successive Administrations’ incompetence in dealing with the causes of crime during the last quarter of a century. Our judges are more than capable of defending themselves and our justice system from this latest unjustified attack and shall do so elsewhere, far more ably than I do here.