Accountability |
Friday, 14 January 2005 | |
The refusal of the Government to pay any compensation to Angela Cannings
confirms the worst part of this miscarriages of justice position. Even when victims of police corruption, incompetance, greed or laziness are exposed by the courts, nobody takes the blame. It's the same in the hundreds of Operation Ore disasters, most recently Commodore David White's apparent suicide. Should people be dying because of society's hysteria and exaggeration? And, if not, should there be no blame allocated? Looking at Sally Clark, Robert Brown, Stephen Downing... there's never any retribution, is there? Bent coppers escape justice; blind judges keep on sipping port and playing golf with dodgy lawyers; bored jurors go home to chipped cups of tea; lying witnesses accept huge compensation and hug their anonymity close to their chests. And after years or decades of prison, the innocent finally walk free whilst the guilty pay no price. There's no accountability. David Blunkett will never pay the price for allowing me to spend years in jail for crimes I did not commit, even though his intervention as Home Secretary might have exposed the fatal flaws in the investigation and prosecution. And there's the answer. Karma DID kick in. It may not be obvious or clearly linked, but his life has fallen apart. And that's the way retribution can arrive, sometimes with a little help. Like finding a past secret affair and leaking it to the local press. Like tipping off the tax man to illegal behaviour. Like exposing the actions of a loved one or relative. Bear that in mind, if ever it happens to you. And, meantime, let's all try to stop the vicious sensationalising by tabloid headline morality from making more victims. Just because tragic cot death mothers make better stories as murderers and fantasists over strange sexual images are better news when painted as perverts doesn't mean it's true. We demand it. We buy it. We can change it. |