Saturday, January 17, 2009
Postscript
A propos of the recent haddock hash, BH turned up a recipe from one Lindsey Bareham. All rather pretensious. It seems that I should have used Belle de Fontenay or Charlotte potatoes rather than Basics Whites from Mr S.. I should have cut the bacon into lardons, rather than just chopping it up. I completely missed the flat leaved parsley and the evenly coagulated free range eggs. Nor did I remove the bones from the fish with tweezers. So all this from someone who probably doesn't bother about the bread she eats.
More seriously, have now finished 'The secrets of Bryn Estyn' by Richard Webster, up to and including Appendix II, all 596 pages of it. Mainly a saga of events following allegations of abuse, mostly made many years after the alleged events, in a childrens' (disturbed young adults) home in North Wales. As noted before, I felt the author missed a trick in not offering a proper balance sheet of allegations, charges, convictions and what have you - Excel would be the place for it. Notwithstanding, come away from the book rather shocked: the story appears to be that there was far more abuse during and as a result of the various investigations than there ever was in the first place. A lot of innocent people have been put in jail for long periods of time as a result of said disturbed young adults being paid substantial sums of money to make allegations.
Webster offers three remedies. The first one is that judges should resume warning jurys about the dangers of uncorroborated allegations - they stopped doing this because it was proving too hard to get rape convictions when jurys were encouraged to doubt the veracity of complainants in this way. The second one is that we should stop paying people to make allegations - payments which are made after trials by the criminal injuries compensation board. While in this case the practise was pernicious, not so clear how one can stop it, without dumping the principle of compensation altogether. Perhaps one could dream up some rule which said that no compensation in cases where the fact of the crime rested solely on the word of the person making the claim. Or perhaps we really should dump compensation and start to edge away from our increasingly litigatious habits. The third one is more technical, all to do with split indictments. There used to be a principle that a trial was about one crime. It might involve more than one charge and more than one criminal but the thing being tried was, in some common sense way, a single crime. There used to be another principle that you could not admit as evidence in the trial of one crime, allegations about another. The reason here being that such allegations were known to be prejudicial rather than evidential (I think probative is the lawyer word here), however much one wrapped them up with warnings. In the present case, care workers were being sent to trial for clusters of alleged crimes, perhaps over a long period, a long time ago, at a number of differant places, on the basis of clusters of allegations collected in trawling operations. That is to say, the alleged victims did not go to the police and say a crime has been committed. The police went to them on a fishing expedition, waving the carrot of compensation. The result was exactly what the two principles were designed to avoid. Judges, lawyers and juries were overwhelmed by the volume of unpleasant allegations (it seems the amount of paperwork in these cases is huge. Well beyond the capacity of your average provincial sollicitor) and decided that there was no smoke without fire. Send him down. So the third remedy is to restore the status quo ante with regard to these two principles.
All very difficult. While it is clear we have a problem, the remedies involve undoing changes which were made with the best of intentions. I shall have to try and get legal opinion.
There is also the wonder about how Webster can get away with making very serious allegations about two of the people that fired this whole thing up in the first place. Does the whole world now know that these allegations are true and that libel actions would get no where? At least in this country where a statement which is true does not count as a libel. I think in some other jurisdictions you can sue for a true libel if it defames.
In the meantime, moved on a rather lighter history of the gunpowder plot by Antonia Fraser. A slightly irritating, chummy rather than plummy style, and one supposes that she has filled a lot of gaps with plausible narrative, rather in the way of a docudrama on telly - but a reasonable read if one skips a bit. A thing which makes me feel guilty. Books are to be read not skipped! I wonder how much better I would have liked the book had it been a decent hardback edition rather than a rather mean and cheap paperback edition in two mean and cheap volumes, ex charity shop?
More seriously, have now finished 'The secrets of Bryn Estyn' by Richard Webster, up to and including Appendix II, all 596 pages of it. Mainly a saga of events following allegations of abuse, mostly made many years after the alleged events, in a childrens' (disturbed young adults) home in North Wales. As noted before, I felt the author missed a trick in not offering a proper balance sheet of allegations, charges, convictions and what have you - Excel would be the place for it. Notwithstanding, come away from the book rather shocked: the story appears to be that there was far more abuse during and as a result of the various investigations than there ever was in the first place. A lot of innocent people have been put in jail for long periods of time as a result of said disturbed young adults being paid substantial sums of money to make allegations.
Webster offers three remedies. The first one is that judges should resume warning jurys about the dangers of uncorroborated allegations - they stopped doing this because it was proving too hard to get rape convictions when jurys were encouraged to doubt the veracity of complainants in this way. The second one is that we should stop paying people to make allegations - payments which are made after trials by the criminal injuries compensation board. While in this case the practise was pernicious, not so clear how one can stop it, without dumping the principle of compensation altogether. Perhaps one could dream up some rule which said that no compensation in cases where the fact of the crime rested solely on the word of the person making the claim. Or perhaps we really should dump compensation and start to edge away from our increasingly litigatious habits. The third one is more technical, all to do with split indictments. There used to be a principle that a trial was about one crime. It might involve more than one charge and more than one criminal but the thing being tried was, in some common sense way, a single crime. There used to be another principle that you could not admit as evidence in the trial of one crime, allegations about another. The reason here being that such allegations were known to be prejudicial rather than evidential (I think probative is the lawyer word here), however much one wrapped them up with warnings. In the present case, care workers were being sent to trial for clusters of alleged crimes, perhaps over a long period, a long time ago, at a number of differant places, on the basis of clusters of allegations collected in trawling operations. That is to say, the alleged victims did not go to the police and say a crime has been committed. The police went to them on a fishing expedition, waving the carrot of compensation. The result was exactly what the two principles were designed to avoid. Judges, lawyers and juries were overwhelmed by the volume of unpleasant allegations (it seems the amount of paperwork in these cases is huge. Well beyond the capacity of your average provincial sollicitor) and decided that there was no smoke without fire. Send him down. So the third remedy is to restore the status quo ante with regard to these two principles.
All very difficult. While it is clear we have a problem, the remedies involve undoing changes which were made with the best of intentions. I shall have to try and get legal opinion.
There is also the wonder about how Webster can get away with making very serious allegations about two of the people that fired this whole thing up in the first place. Does the whole world now know that these allegations are true and that libel actions would get no where? At least in this country where a statement which is true does not count as a libel. I think in some other jurisdictions you can sue for a true libel if it defames.
In the meantime, moved on a rather lighter history of the gunpowder plot by Antonia Fraser. A slightly irritating, chummy rather than plummy style, and one supposes that she has filled a lot of gaps with plausible narrative, rather in the way of a docudrama on telly - but a reasonable read if one skips a bit. A thing which makes me feel guilty. Books are to be read not skipped! I wonder how much better I would have liked the book had it been a decent hardback edition rather than a rather mean and cheap paperback edition in two mean and cheap volumes, ex charity shop?
# posted by Jim @ 12:20 AM 
