Eight former police officers were discharged today, some 23 years after the killing that led to them being charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Given three men were wrongly convicted of murder and another eventually convicted there seems no doubt justice was perverted. Equally, we have to accept that the eight former officers were not responsible for it. You just have to love English justice!
The former officers themselves now feel and claim they were subject to a malevolent investigation. The trial has collapsed because of disclosure issues, including evidence being destroyed on the instruction of a senior officer who seems to be claiming this was an accident. Some of the former officers have been on police bail for nearly 6 years!
Elsewhere the Stephen Lawrence affair grinds on – and I find myself wondering if I could convict 18 years on, simply on the grounds from other cases on the reliability of forensic evidence. Four months after the Mark Duggan shooting, which looks a straightforward matter to me, we have no public resolution and a rumour mill that could spark further riots.
I’d call for a public inquiry if I didn’t already know how dud they are! I think what we have is a crisis in bureaucracy. In the age of “learning lessons” none ever are. The question is whether any investigations and prosecution procedures can really be trusted. What a miserable low. We have no way of knowing if these former officers are innocent, though this is what must be accepted following the prosecution cock-up. What a bloody awful mess. I’d call for people to be sacked, but there’s more chance of the BBC sacking Clarkson for just being the knob he is. Maybe he could get the job of the sacked’filthy little Arab’ Cornish bus driver?
Clarkson, of course, is a paid buffoon who raises the odd smile in me but is basically a bore and waste of oxygen. He should admit this, apologise and disappear up an exhaust pipe having donated any money he has accumulated to climate change science. He doesn’t know what work is, After a spell in monastic orders he could return and do John Craven’s non-job until he’s 67 and fit to be pensioned-off to News Round. I expect an apology from him more likely than the ones we need from those in authority and might even be heart-felt if he did a week in Jobcentre Plus as a bouncer (not that he’d last).
No one is responsible these days, so why should he be?
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