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Blunkett's latest barmy ideas and dear old Hutton... |
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Tuesday, 24 February 2004 |
The Hutton Report is so typical of the tunnel vision I experienced in my case that I had to pass comment.
"Within the remit" appears to me to disguise horrendous miscarriages of justice. By looking no further and wearing blinkers, the Hutton Report is rubbish. The police, lawyers and judges in my case did the same. They simply looked to prove me guilty. As an example, when they searched my house they took away 50 or 60 polaroid pictures of teenage boys. All perfectly normal (indeed, one was Peter Noone: "Herman," who's the same age as me, as were many of the others...I was a teenager in the 60's and one photo of ME in swimming trunks brought the irate question from the officer "Who is that boy?"). They deliberately ignored the hundreds of other Plaroids of couples, families, middle aged friends and old people. My own barrister asked me to "explain the photos of teenage boys." Many were the same friends and they were simply a group of mates who were teenagers, but, separated from the bulk, it looked as though I was obsessed with teenage boys. The interpretation was entirely wrong and simply justified the desired result. I suspect they could do the same if they searched anybody's house.
Exactly as we found with the 5000 ruined families in cot death investigations and the 54 possibly wrongly jailed mothers, if they are determined to get guilty verdicts, they will and the search for their version of the truth may unintentionally or deliberately avoid opposite conclusions.
Jurors cannot assimilate the nuances of defence ("There were hundreds of other photos of other people"). As it happened, the photos never became an element of my case (so much rubbish was thrown out) but the principle is vital. We, as a society, are at the same stage when we manufacture the crimes to fit the headlines.
Now Blunkett comes out of the closet and says it would be far easier to jail terrorists on suspicion only. We're already doing this. If there was one speck of "evidence" in many sex cases like my own. The result would be more fair. But there's not...We have to prove a negative; hard if not impossible. There are, please believe me, not just 54 wrongly jailed women but hundreds of innocent men in Britain's prisons today, all victims of tunnel vision. As I watched Hutton's dull, dusty, reasoned and endless speech, drained of all blood, I regonized the Old Baily courtroom. God spare us from blinkered judges and blind home secretaries.
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