I Can’t Help It – Peter Hitchens Is Right
Francis Beckett explains why Peter Hitchens is right when it comes to the Stephen Lawrence verdict.
17 Jan 2012, 09:00
Stephen Lawrence
I’m not often heard to cheer when Peter Hitchens turns out his Mail on Sunday column. He’s terribly reactionary most of the time.
But recently he’s said something which no one else is saying now – but which someone had to say, and which I predict a lot of people, especially those who care about civil liberties, will be saying in five years time.
The reason no one else is saying it is that it runs against the current accepted wisdom that the sentencing of two men for murdering Stephen Lawrence is, without any qualification, the eventual triumph of good over evil.
It’s come, Hitchens says, at a heavy price.
First, it’s come at the price of abandoning the double jeopardy rule. The rule was there for a purpose – to stop the police, when they had a case they couldn’t prove, bringing someone back and back to the courts until eventually they found a jury to arrive at the correct verdict. Abandoning this rule may have put two guilty men behind bars today, but one day it will put someone innocent behind bars.
Second, we’ve accepted the idea that the police may set up surveillance equipment in your home, even though they have no hard evidence you have done anything wrong, and then call a press conference and play to the world’s media the conversations you had with your friends, your wife, your husband, which you thought were private. Perhaps, this time, it has helped send two guilty men to prison. Perhaps next time it will be your home, if you have the misfortune to be under suspicion of having committed a crime, whether you did so or not.
Third, even the most liberal commentators seem to gloat because one of the two men was so badly beaten up in prison that he is almost deaf. In a civilised society, we consider loss of liberty the punishment for wrongdoing, not having the living daylights beaten out of you. I feel affronted that our government allows our citizens to be tortured in Guantanamo Bay – but if I approve torture in a British prison, I will have no further right to protest when it happens in an American one.
I admire Neville and Doreen Lawrence – their dignity, their perseverance, their nobly born suffering, their intelligent and selfless campaigning; and I want to see the killers of their son brought to justice as much as anyone. The police behaved appallingly at the start of this affair, and not the least of their crimes was to allow clothes to be removed from the house of a suspect before that house was searched. Those clothes might have proved these men did this dreadful thing. Or they might not; we will never know.
Do we now know for certain that these men killed Stephen Lawrence? I would love to applaud the consensus that we do; but we do not. The jury found them guilty, and I think they probably are. But our system has imprisoned the wrong people before, sometimes for decades, and this was not an open and shut case. If I could pray, I would pray that the right men are in prison.
The fault for this mess lies with the police, and it is a wrenching irony that the main result of it is to give the police greater powers, to the long term detriment of our civil liberties.
The author
Francis Beckett
Francis Beckett is a writer and journalist and editor of the book Prime Ministers Who Never Were.
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Comments (1)
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There is much here I agree with, particularly the part around one of them being beaten in prison. Even setting aside the Guantanamo analogy we sit and watch programmes like Banged Up Abroad and tut about how savage the regime is and how other inmates are animals, yet some are clearly happy for the same to happen here. And that was when he was on remand - as an innocent (though accused) man!
I also agree that it was far from an open shut case. They may well be guilty but from what have heard of the case the evidence was hardly compelling. Watching the news at the stage when they were giving their defence I recall my partner saying to me 'they're going to get away with it again'. I thought that was telling. While I am not saying the Jury did not act professionally at all, the feeling in the country and in the media was that these were men who had got away with murder. It was not a case of 'did they do it?' it was a case of 'will they finally get caught?' The media before and after the trial reflects this.
On the issue of double jeopardy though I do not agree. Sure it was a law that was there for a reason, but as you say yourself innocent men are sent to prison. They have ways to remedy these miscarriages of justice through appeal, emergence of new evidence etc. Should not these processes exist if there is a miscarriage of justice the other way?
If someone commits a murder, is found not guilty and later it can be proven they committed the crime, or even worse they confess to it, then surely there should be a way to overturn the original decision? The important thing is to make sure that the process is monitored properly and independently (as I believe it has been so far) to ensure that the new evidence does indeed qualify the case for a new trial.
17/01/2012 10:29