Ken innocent

Nick Freeman: Speeding? It was just a mercy dash to fix my wife's £1,000 Louboutins: Mr Loophole's the lawyer who gets stars off motoring charges - but can you tell his excuses from the equally daft ones we've made up? | Mail Online

 

Remember that when it comes to discrimination, voters are perfectly entitled to discriminate against election candidates in any way they please, including on the basis of their race, religion, gender, appearance, or false allegations which have been made against them. Indeed voters very often do discriminate in such ways, and that's simply the way democracy works. Likewise customers choosing from whom to buy goods and services can discriminate similarly without penalty. It is only in certain limited areas, like employers hiring staff, that e.g. racial discrimination is illegal, and even then it is often clandestine and impossible to prove. It is against this background that we have to consider the case of the acquitted defendant.

I agree with you that it is not right and unethical. Society would have to progress considerably in many ways before anything could be done about it though.

 

Perhaps you are thinking of the kind of case where there is a great mass of evidence pointing to the guilt of the accused, but then it comes to light that an item of that evidence has been falsified. The jury may then be persuaded to doubt the genuineness of the rest of the evidence, and to grant the benefit of that doubt to the defendant. It may be that he is probably guilty - but probably is not good enough.

 

Driving laws and driving offences are themselves technicalities. In these types of cases, people are prosecuted even though no harm has been done and there is no victim. The laws are strict and arbitrary, the penalties are draconian. I see nothing unethical in people trying to escape their rigours by making use of legal provisions which are there for everyone's protection. An example: the law allows robotic machines to be used to catch and punish human beings, but it also prescribes strict procedures for such machines to be authorised, calibrated and tested. If those procedures have not been carried out properly, the process is vitiated - and quite right too.

 

So no one gets harmed and there are no victims through the use of motorised vehicles……that most using them don't really have the element of control required so there has to be said motoring laws in place to restrict said use.….? explain yourself here Pete…..

Secondly are you advocating justice not being served…..i thought you said "The purpose of the trial process is to sort defendants into two categories, guilty and not guilty"

 

You posted link to an article which listed several motoring cases. In those types of cases, people were prosecuted even though there were no victims and no harm had been done, like I said in my response. If you now want to move the debate on to other types of cases in which harm was done and there were victims, go right ahead - we can debate this new and different situation if you like, but it seems unrelated to the cases listed in your link.

Indeed, like I said the purpose of the trial process is to sort defendants into two categories guilty and not guilty. Those defendants against whom defective or corrupt evidence is brought, or where the prosecution has failed to meet legal requirements, thereby fall into the not guilty category. Do you have a problem with that?

 

Colin Montgomerie

THE CASE: Another three-time client of Freeman’s, the heavyweight golfer escaped a possible 56-day ban in June 2010, having been fined £60 for driving his £115,000 Bentley Continental Flying Spur at 70mph in a 40mph zone of the A3 in South-West London, then failing to pay the penalty on time.

How did Freeman persuade the court to let Monty keep driving?

(a) Monty has a medical condition that requires him to eat twice as often as other people and so has to travel by car because the buffet trolleys are apt to run out on trains.

(b) Monty is scared of flying and is thus obliged to drive from his home in Scotland to Surrey just to see his and ex-wife Eimear’s three children.

(c) Monty cannot fly because he’s always harassed in the departure lounge by sports fans asking him why he’s never won a single golf Major.

which one of these is a result of a case of defective or corrupt evidence……...

 

On the facts as reported in the Daily Mail (no doubt a highly reliable source), Montgomerie's was indeed a case where no harm was done and there was no victim - which is exactly relevant to the point under discussion, as it happens. If he was able to persuade the court not to acquit but to impose a light penalty - so what? Why shouldn't he?

 

Let's take a look at search warrants, shall we. When a judicially-authorised search warrant is executed, if those executing it happen across stolen property, drugs, illegal weapons, or dead bodies they must take appropriate action, even if what they find has nothing to do with the original justification for the warrant. More commonly, they can take into custody evidential material (not in itself illegal) related to the warrant, which could be almost anything: papers, clothes, computers, tableware, anything. So far so good.

The problem is, there is a potential for a great mischief here. If police were able to search premises without a warrant, or in violation of the terms of a warrant, confiscate anything, and yet still have whatever they confiscate accepted as admissible evidence just the same, then liberty would have been destroyed. It is essential for courts to exclude illegally-obtained material, thus making sure the police do not keep doing it again, as otherwise the safeguards of the warrant system would evaporate.

 

So what do you mean by a "technicality"? Do you mean something which is somehow invalid, or unnecessary, or inappropriate? Why would that be?

And what do you mean by "very clearly guilty"? If a defendant has been acquitted, who are you to say they are "very clearly guilty"?

 

Have a look at this case, it was on the local news a lot at the time. A shitbag who shouldn't have been driving a lorry ran over a 12 year old boy and drove off. The boy was killed. The shitbags family made the parents life a misery, even vandalising the poor kids grave. The father snapped, and shot the shitbag twice at close range with a sawn off shotgun before going on the run. He handed himself in, and was charged with various offences including attempted murder. He was acquitted by the jury.

http://sixthformlaw.info/01_modules/mod1/1_5_lay_people/1_5_2_juries/16_stephen_owen.htm

 

This thread reminded me to differentiate between 'innocent' and 'not guilty' in future - quite rightly. What with DLT also being found 'not guilty' (although a retrial hinted at) I wonder they don't cancel Rolf's trial right now.

 

If you are innocent until proven guilty and the trial verdict is "not guilty" then you must, ipso facto, be innocent. In which case there can be no lack of equation between innocent and not guilty.

If you assume that not guilty and innocent are not synonyms, then clearly you cannot believe in the presumption of innocence. QED.

 

Agree with Bradders & Glid

Of course up here in Jockland we have the third way.

Not Proven - when the Jury think the defendant was guilty but the evidence or case presented by prosecution was too weak to convict

Jeez as if getting a choice wasn't enuff

John

 

we better tell all those newspapers and TV stations then Bradders as most of them used the term 'not guilty' as far as I can see/MOO