The Savile factor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3uMgcRUYBs

The Law Society in 1966 and the Howard League for Penal Reform in 1976 campaigned for the end of docks. They failed because of a lack of political will to act, the perceived triviality of the issue. significantly the Bar Council opposed the dock’s demise in 1966, insisting, with a patrician tone, that the defendant must have “his proper enclosure”.

Perhaps this country’s defendants now deserve a place next to their lawyers. And perhaps the English dock, along with clerical dressing-up, might find itself in the dock in the near future. Ironically, in fact, there is no legal requirement for any accused to be confined to a dock in any court unless the judge orders it, and judges rarely do. It is a habit of the court!

Perhaps it might be legitimately said that there are far more important issues regarding getting justice for innocent defendants than where they are physically situated in the hall of judgement.

For example: -

In their opening statement to the court the prosecution often lists in lurid detail a catalogue of the alleged abuse which it is claimed the defendant has committed. This creates a highly charged, prejudicial and emotional atmosphere that causes the jury considerable confusion and anxiety.

Up until this moment of declaration in the formality of a judicial setting the accuser has been referred to as being a victim. The accused man standing in the dock has been referred to in all official documents as a perpetrator. In short, semantically, the accuser has been sexually abused and or raped by this man. The outcome of guilt has already been decided, even before the formality of a trial. The accused is in the dock. That man, there. It is he who has committed this crime, and to show it we have placed him in a cage with an officer or two to guard you from him.

This is the starting point of the culture we have developed since the horrifying events of the Savile inquiry.

The previous, almost sacred process - the assumption of innocence until proof of guilt has been provided - has been driven underground and discarded. That needs re-saying. The accused is guilty. There he is in the (caged) dock. We know this because the language of the court already declares the accuser to be the Victim and the accused to be the Perpetrator of the alleged crime against that Victim whom you see before you now.

The task before the court now is for the ‘perpetrator’ and his defence to prove his innocence. This assumption is tantamount to proof of guilt. His defence barrister’s job is no longer to challenge the evidence that the prosecution has managed to scrape together and prove them wrong, but to try to prove that his presumed-to-be-guilty client is in fact innocent!

The opening statement of the prosecution does nothing to mitigate this. On the contrary. There is a legal conspiracy to convict the accused.

As Webster has put it:

“The reality is, in all too many cases that, by the time the prosecution opening has been completed, both the jury and the judge may have been caught up in a current of prejudice so powerful that they are swept together toward a guilty verdict without being able to properly assess the evidence which is presented to them.”

Defence Barrister.

Imagine the size of the task confronting defence barristers in this culture.

1. Yes, there may be many respectable character witnesses who are pillars of society willing to write to the court or even to appear to give a testimony. Over two hundred of them had written such statements in my case. Most of these individuals were prepared to attend the court and give their testimonies.

2. It may be that the accuser’s fantasies and accusations are almost beyond belief.

3. It may be that and the jury have a strong suspicion that there is an element of malice or serious delusion and mental illness or a desire to get financial compensation from the court.

But the outgoing assumption of guilt by the court provides a powerful disincentive to any jury to challenge this prevailing culture. For them to do so would require them to question their own dependence upon a civilised and fair legal system working to sustain a law-abiding society that is providing them with the assurance of their own safety and security. After all, they are part of the culture themselves.

It has been said to me, "No-one wants to see a Savile walking free from their courtroom". Although this has already happened - so that ship has sailed. This has left us with a legacy of contempt for the rule of law. Frighteningly it is being increasingly replaced by a far less means of proof 'the balance of probability'.

Another Savile?

It is now automatically assumed that every accused individual is another Savile. But the question has never seriously been asked,

“Can there ever be another Savile?”

A working class miner dressed himself in gold lame suits, puffed, like Winston Churchill on a huge cigar, festooned himself in gold rings and bling, aping a caricature of the swanky toff, here was a little weasel of a disc jockey who became the centre of everyone’s attention. No-one in their right mind would want anything to do with this creep in real life.

Yet he was honoured by both Pope and Queen, cow-towing to his glitter, bling and fame. If this were offered as a character in a work of fiction, he would be totally unbelievable. And yet this nobody had the real toffs of the BBC, governments, the Roman Catholic Church and British Royal Family bowing and scraping before him. He was, after all royalty. Media Royalty. He may not have been the Messiah, but he had worked the ultimate miracle of bringing-in the teenagers by their regular millions to this dusty post-Riethian organisation, and thereby within the control of international power-holders under the guise of the enlightenment of public taste! Jim Fixed it for them, and they were correspondingly grateful (or blinded).

The Famous Hero Fad

But the truth probably is, there could only ever be another pantomime paedophile if those who placed him at the top of the BBC hierarchy in the first place, much to their own personal distaste, were to do so again, to another nobody, in pursuit of the attention and loyalty of a large mass of the UK population. These days, audience figures cap morality every time.

As a collateral victim of this behaviour by those in charge of the law I say an ironic, "Thanks, BBC. Thanks, Pope John Paul II’s advisers. Thanks, your majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s advisers. Because what you have left us with is an un-challenged probable criminal and an ethos in which the Innocent now suffer the punishments that were rightly his.

Partner Impact: (My wife Linda's testimony).

Against this background a falsely accused’s victim's wife has voiced her personal daily agony…

“False allegations are worse than crimes. Victims of crimes get sympathy. Victims of false allegations get no sympathy. What they get is punishment and penalisation. Not to mention the stress causing damage to families, friends and regular communities where the victims used to have status and a welcome. Savile, the real criminal gets the title, ‘Sir’ and ‘Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great’, and my innocent son goes to prison.”

“It is an abuse of laws and a perversion of justice usually perpetrated for malicious, spiteful, economic or other evil reasons, so should be treated as a crime in itself.”

Of course, some false accusers are experiencing mental health issues, and this is the origin of their fantasies. Not every accuser has an evil motivation.

But as I have said, and many agree, prosecutors and police have been more than a little inclined to believe the accuser. She - more often than not it's a she, but there are plenty of male false accusers - is the truth-teller. But prosecutors ought to have a duty to remember that they should start from the presumption of innocence. They should seek evidence objectively, not with a bias towards believing the accuser, despite what Theresa May said when she was Home Secretary, and Sir Kier Starmer before her that all accusers should be believed. Seeking objective evidence is only fair. However, we live in an age of moral panic, post-Savile, regarding issues of rape and sexual abuse.

Many carers, teachers, doctors, clergy and public officials and entertainers are are walking as quietly as they can on eggshells.

The Savile Factor.

TV star Jimmy Savile had been the subject of rumour for years. He was never charged. He died in 2011 with no convictions of sexual crime against him. So, as far as anyone in the public really knows, he was an entirely innocent man!

Yet here was a man who all of his 84 years had reportedly used his fame and influence to sexually abuse hundreds of women and children. he was declared by the press and others to have been a paedophile and rapist of the first order.

But he was never brought before the court for these alleged offences.

Savile suffered no consequences for his alleged crimes except that his grave was subsequently desecrated by his own family, and the media, unlike with other infamous people, stopped publishing his image. It was as though to do so would be an immoral act in itself.

But one very important and life-changing thing did change...

Police policies.

In fact, Savile had been investigated by many police forces during his life, but none had believed the claims made against him. Or at least, no action had been taken against him. In fact, it was reported that people were warned off making allegations against him.

These were days when detectives had too much discretion in writing-off allegations, not recording them as possible crimes. Some complainants were reluctant to speak because they feared not being taken seriously, and others, knowing how other victims of sexual crime had been treated, kept silent for fear of harsh and invasive, intimate interrogations, and fear of being disbelieved. It will never be known how many men and women, boys and girls were sexually abused or raped in the UK in those days. None of who dared to bring the story of their abuse to the police.

But after Savile, in a good way, police began to take allegations of sexual crimes more seriously. The question in everyone’s mind was, how many other abusers, like Savile had been getting away with it?

In violation of the principle of the rule of law, "Innocent until proven guilty", in 2015 Home Office rules for recording crime were edited to include: 'The intention is that victims are believed.' Since 2014, 5,740 people came forward to make allegations of historic abuse, naming 4,801 suspects. Including ordinary people, celebrities, politicians and sportsmen.

It quickly became clear innocent people were being wrongly targeted. Claims against them were not properly scrutinised. Since then, there has been a welter of false allegations against all classes of people, with the #MeToo movement adding fuel to the witch-hunt.

Yes. Times have, fortunately for those victims who in the past have been ignored by the state, but unfortunately for the innocent accused, changed.

Yewtree, Rotherham, Oxford, Bristol, Savile, Newcastle, Aylesbury, have all become infamous single-word bye-names for the covering up of sexual exploitation of vulnerable people by those in power.

It took time for this change to occur. The criminal justice system eventually caught up, often too late and ineffectively, such as in the case of Savile, whose name was too big to be challenged. The reasons for this silence by the authorities, sometimes for fear of upsetting delicate cultural balances in affected communities, at other times a disinclination to pin specific crimes onto specific racial groupings, and sometimes because of the fame and political influence of offending individuals, are gradually being unearthed by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).

A New and Odd Role for the Police: ‘Giving Victims a Voice’.

The only thing in favour of this phrase is that it is alliterative and therefore good as media bait. But it is evil and unjust in its practice.

The Home Affairs Committee called for special measures to safeguard alleged perpetrators. The Committee’s aim was to make certain that the presumption of innocence was properly respected in the courts. We all want the wrongs of the past to be righted. No-one wants a return to the days when sexual crimes went unreported, ignored and covered-up.

The recent forced resignation of former Archbishop George Cary as honorary assistant bishop in the Oxford diocese is a testimony to this. All kinds of people suffer in the current system. This reactionary pendulum swing of moral panic ought not to be allowed to continue to create more, this time different, but equally devastating wrongs.

Life becomes difficult, and for some who kill themselves literally unbearable, for the falsely accused. Unlike any other criminal procedure, there is a unique background to sexual offences cases. It is a habit shared by both left and right press reporting. It is the ethos of widespread moral panic. It is fanned by the media, and, lacking moral courage, political will and bound by extreme political correctness, rarely if ever challenged by the left. It enjoys surviving on a daily diet of the historical wrongdoings of high profile accused people and perpetrators.

Media frenzy.

Often legal investigations, poorly and inadequately conducted such as in the very public and hyped investigative procedure followed in the case of Sir Cliff Richard, take place in this unbalanced atmosphere. Whilst saying that juries are not supposed to read about their cases on pain of prosecution, the actual medium in which these trials begin is laced with what was considered to be the perfectly acceptable publication of photographs, names and addresses, and biased, selectively edited mini-biographies of these accused individuals, whilst at the same time respecting the sacred anonymity of their accusers, their invisible and ghostly attackers.

Some may say that the press has no input into the trial procedure. But it does. What is the impact on juries as they leave the court and purchase their daily paper or go online for the latest in their case? This is a human thing to do, despite the direction of the judge that jurors do not investigate their cases in this way. Banned from discussing the case outside of the jury-room, they still do. No-one monitors them. They are ordered by the judge and then set loose on their daily lives, totally trusted to do the right thing. But they are human beings in a digital world, not monks or hermits out of the reach of signals. It is however quite rare for a juror to be discovered doing his or her own research, even though it carries the potential for a severe custodial sentence.

Errant Juror.

57-year-old Gary Henderson, a former juror who researched information about a case taking place at Teesside Crown Court, and shared his new information with other members of the jury pleaded guilty to two offences under the Juries Act 1974, and was warned he could be given a prison sentence for his crime. Judge Simon Bourne-Arton QC, Recorder of Middlesbrough, after receiving a pre-sentence report handed down a six months suspended sentence.

The consequences of Henderson’s behaviour were the abandonment of the trial, the dismissal of the jury and re-appointment of another. All witnesses, the alleged victim and defendant and their families and supporters would have to go through the repeated stress, anxiety and inconvenience of a re-ordered trial, not to mention the expense. Henderson was lucky to get away with a suspended sentence. And yet, this circus, this farce, is allowed to repeat itself at every sexual abuse trial.

Accuser /Perpetrator: Which is Which?

The legal process is almost entirely weighted in favour of the accuser in sex cases. The ‘accuser’ is given the status of ‘victim’ - which doubtless endears the police and CPS to the Rape Crisis Support industry whose financial existence one may well suspect depends on sucking up to the establishment - and against the accused, being referred to in all official documents as the ‘Perpetrator’.

How this almost sacred status of ‘victim’ assigned almost unthinkingly to one who is actually a ‘complainant’ arose is dramatically illustrated by the Metropolitan Police investigation into criminal behaviour by Jimmy Savile. Although the police operation assumed the form and shape of a police inquiry, it soon mutated into a moral crusade focused on hyperbolizing the scale of crimes allegedly committed by ‘Celebrity Abusers’. The inquiry itself explicitly acknowledged that its investigation of historic allegations was not so much about solving crimes as ' Giving victims a voice'. This is of course not the proper role of the police. They were never employed ‘to give victims a voice’. That was never their task. It is not, and should never be on their agenda. They are employed to gather and present evidence. Their role is to investigate crime and bring it under the scrutiny of the law, not to manipulate the social ethos in favour of prejudice against suspects, even though it might do the crime figures a power of good and attract funding to the institution.

Victims, perpetrators, the role of the police and CPS, celebrity criminals and famous lives wrecked by fantasists, liars, attention or compensation-seekers, caged docks and external influence exerted on juries.

Things that need challenging and changing in a broken and underfunded legal system - once the envy of the world, but now a third-rate scramble for getting the prisons filled and reassuring the public that, really, all is well