Covering the drug smuggling girls in Peru, the media happily talks about them "pleading guilty in order to get lesser sentences". Yet nobody in the media seems able to accept or broadcast the possibility that Stuart Hall (and many others) do the same - plead guilty to lesser charges to get smaller sentences.

Even if they are not guilty.

It is either beyond the brain cell capability of most humans to understand or believe or the sad shoring up of the opinion that our broken system is NOT broken. I've been there. It is.

and they all sing from the same song sheet.

Once these papers & TV outlets had foreign correspondents or a local stringer...now they all get their info from one agency or a hack like that string in Thailand (who has lost his accreditation there).

so when a lie or mistake is made, they all parrot it.

And the media has expanded which has good points (Anna Raccoon - and JK's voice can be heard) but bad ones too (idiots can spread hatred, lies and rumours).

The sad fact is that today its a lawyers world and morality is based not purely on wrong or right but on 'playing the percentages'. To me, if someone is guilty then they should face the consequences of their actions and pay whatever the law demands they pay. The whole idea of pleading guilty to get a lesser sentence to me adds a certain amount of acceptance for what they have done into the equation and is thus wrong. To give a person a lesser sentence for in effect saving the tax payer money does not sit well with me - on the other hand if by pleading guilty the defendant has 'held his or her hands up and shown remorse for whatever crime has been committed' I can see the sense of fair play and justice in it.

The HUGE snag today however is that the legal system has turned into a money making process as much as it is about wrong or right and that means the potential is there for 'problems' to occur.

To be 100% fair to you JK I am prepared to admit here that I am undecided about the outcome of your conviction. Part of me believes in you and can see evidence to support this belief but parts of me feel otherwise and feels that at the very least there are 'worrying questions' that I do find easy in my mind to dismiss even given your explanations (as given in numerous press interviews both written and vocal).

As an honest person, commenting on some aspect of the judicial system here for the first time, I feel I owe it to you to make this point of view of mine known. If from this post you decide to ban me I will of course understand. I will NOT however see any ban as the act of a guilty conscience. I am not here to judge, nor could I as I have never walked in your shoes - nor the shoes of any other - but I am trying to understand and form an opinion that is not purely based on what I'm told by the media but by personal experience.

I am sorry if this post is upsetting but I just felt I must be open and honest regarding my position to you. To do anything other than such I feel would be hypercritical.

That's a somewhat fair and balanced post, TM.

An important principle of our legal system is that people are punished proportionately for what they have been convicted of. We no longer have hangings for petty theft, as we once did. To my mind, pleading guilty in return for a lesser sentence undermines this maxim. Thus we can have the situation where two co-defendants involved in the same events can be sentenced wildly differently when one pleads guilty while the other exercises his right to a trial. This is one of several reasons why I am not a great fan of the adversarial trial system, preferring the inquisitorial approach used in much of continental Europe and *gasp* shariah law.

Regarding the validity of our host's prosecution, and other such similar cases, I take a fairly uncompromising line. I want to see defendants convicted fairly and squarely, according to our laws and rules of evidence, or else not at all. I do not give a single damn whether JK ever molested anyone. What matters to me is that the evidence against him was farcical and any guilty verdict resulting from it is perverse, whimsical and arbitrary, rather than considered, logical and beyond reasonable doubt. Whether JK sexually assaulted anyone or not, he should not have been convicted (or even prosecuted) on such a poor standard of evidence. If that means JK "got away with it" then so be it. He should have been convicted fairly and squarely, or else not at all.

I reckon you and I would get on really well Tuppenceworth! We may not always agree I'm sure but we would be able to 'challenge' each other without ever arguing and that is a skill I wish more people could master.

I am a straight talking sort and often get on the wrong side of people because of it. I like to think however that I am a fair man and an honourable one and I agree with you when you say that JK should only have been found guilty if the evidence proved him to be so beyond reasonable doubt. Now, again in total fairness, I must state that I am probably not as well 'up' with the evidence in JK's case as you Tuppenceworth so I cannot really comment on the farcicalness or otherwise of the evidence put forward. That it was enough to convince a jury of his guilt I also agree is not concrete proof of his guilt either. I am a 'Ripperologist' (well, an amateur one) and have read extensively about the Florence Maybrick case. She was (I believe) totally innocent of the crime she was accused of but due at first to the opinion of the press (though they did effectively change sides by the end of the trial) and the strange and inaccurate summing up by the judge was convicted and sentenced to hang. In the end (after much campaigning) the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for 15 years but 15 years in prison back then was like hell on earth!

The point is that it must be solely the EVIDENCE and only the EVIDENCE that drives the jury to come to its decision but allowing for the fact we are all human and are thus susceptible to emotions and personal opinions clouding our judgement this is not always what happens. JK has always been a man to speak honestly in public and so for this reason I would hope people should lean toward believing him. The snag is, by his own admission, he has also often gone out of his way to wind people up (I thought Old Parkie was going to chin him in 1981! HA HA) so such a quest to potentially make himself unpopular may well have come back to bite him HARD in this case.

Who knows? I was not there. I am certainly not prepared to dismiss claims lightly though especially when there are several (though I take on board JK's point in 'Vile Pervert' about bandwagon jumpers etc). The snag is that it is much harder to prove you did NOT do something someone says you did than to prove you DID because if you did you will remember details about how you did it that might help you prove that you did. There are also of course numerous other factors to add into calculations as to why a person may or may not admit to something/not admit to something which is why as I stated before I am not here to judge but to form an opinion based on my own experience.

One thing I DO believe 100% though is that different times do have different moralities and as such it is incredibly difficult to FAIRLY judge a person 30 or 40 years on from the date of the alleged crime. I guess some would say if a person DID do what they were accused of and got convicted even unfairly that they got what they deserved but I personally feel that if the judicial system/police/whoever does not lead by example then we are all lost and justice in general is made a mockery of...

All of this said, I do believe in traditional British Justice and think that the system of two sides playing opposite 'Devils Advocate' ( hearing both sides of an argument in detail) is a good way for the truth to come to the surface more often than not. Like any system though it is not fail proof and it is those who are falsely convicted who tragically suffer the most..