To make the point more vivid, the Telegraph helpfully ran an article about what ordeals the Soham child murderer might face in the El Salvadorean megaprison CECOT, where prisoners are “allegedly beaten, sexually abused, fed rotten food, and leave with missing teeth”. (The last part, at least, is fake news — prisoners rarely ever leave CECOT at all, except in a box.) It’s all a far cry from Huntley’s reported current schedule of “DVDs, chess games, and frequent trips to the gym”.

With the UK judicial system now looking partisan and/or arbitrary to many, taking a leaf out of the Trumpian playbook might seem a natural move for fellow populist Farage. Earlier this year, the US President’s officials sent 238 Venezuelans accused of gang membership to CECOT; they have since been repatriated to their home country, and have spoken of the experience as “hell” and “like a horror movie”. During a summit with El Salvadorean leader Nayib Bukele in April, Trump talked of his intention to send “homegrown criminals” to the foreign megaprison too. But transferred from the symbolic realm of mirror-shaded American thug machismo to that of bumbling, half-cut British prevarication, there is surely something fantastical about the idea of our ever actually emulating the US scheme in practice.

The Americans have ICE, which sounds like a superhero franchise; we have the Home Office, which sounds like an expense declared on a tax return. They have Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, filming her videos standing in front of tattooed men in cages; we have Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, sending viewers to sleep with long answers about her one-in-one-out scheme on TikTok. And of course — for the moment anyway — we also have the European Court of Human Rights. But anyway, the optics of outsourcing criminal punishment to foreign chaps seems a bit weird for an arch-Brexiteer like Farage — weren’t we supposed to be taking back control?

Still, whether or not Huntley eventually finds himself enrolled on the world’s most brutal Spanish language immersion course, it is clear that attitudes are changing. The British Right is increasingly happy to play up the idea of criminal justice as both retribution and deterrent, and not as the attempted rehabilitation of social unfortunates, as many progressives would prefer to frame it. And it seems that the general public approves. One recent poll has 67% of respondents “strongly” or “somewhat” supporting chemical castration for serious sex offenders. Other polls suggest there is significant backing for reintroducing the death penalty for specific crimes. Stuck in cheek-turning mode for decades, we now seem to be heading towards an explicitly eye-swapping phase.

Partly, this expresses a simple desire to get some order back into a chaotic situation. On Tuesday, Dame Anne Owers’ independent review into prison capacity was published, identifying a raft of Tory planning failures that eventually led to last year’s government decision to release thousands of offenders early, including some with convictions for violence. At least one of those released went on to immediately reoffend. It was also reported on Tuesday that, faced with the prospect of a massive Palestine Action protest this Saturday, the Ministry of Justice has launched its “capacity gold command” emergency protocol to deal with an influx of dangerous placard-wielding Quakers and Anglican priests into a prison system already 97.5% full.

While Reform voters might not care much about the fate of pro-Palestinian protesters, they certainly care about that of Lucy Connolly, still in jail for an inflammatory tweet while delivery drivers who sexually assaulted a child have received exactly the same sentence. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” was a familiar playground chant in my childhood. It may not be true, strictly speaking, but the implied common-sense message about policing priorities now seems entirely lost on both Left and Right.

But the increased enthusiasm for harsh measures is perhaps also a reaction to the inability of some naïve politicians to see the law as having any deterrent function at all. This myopia was apparent in two recent parliamentary decisions: to decriminalize abortion for mothers up until birth, and to make doctor-assisted suicide legal. In both cases, the thought that the existing law, with criminal penalties attached, might be deterring people from abusive, coercive, or dangerous decision-making was ignored by supporters of the changes in question. Instead, we were exhorted to think mainly of those poor, well-intentioned people who suddenly find themselves killing a viable baby in the womb or offing an aging parent, and who are then undeservedly tormented by the prospect they might be put away.

Still, noticing that a law has a deterrent function, among other useful things it does, is one thing. Inventing highly theatrical punishments, only or mainly to act as sources of deterrence is another. In response to Trump’s CECOT initiatives, there have been lots of progressive-badged pieces ruefully lamenting that for this President, the “cruelty is the point”. But while this analysis fits with the usual depiction of Trump as cartoon villain, in fact it gets things exactly backwards.

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By Peter Hitchens

The biggest problem with CECOT-style ventures for those of genuinely liberal sensibilities is not that cruelty is being pursued by politicians as an end in itself. Rather, it is that cruelty is being used quite calmly and deliberately as a means, calculated to send a wider message as its main object. The performative infliction of painful, humiliating punishments on particular individuals is done for the supposed wider good: to intimidate onlookers into avoiding behavior harmful to the perceived social order. (And the people who have spent the last few years making denunciations and signing open letters really ought to know this stuff.)

Though they are often thought to go together, this utilitarian attitude doesn’t sit very well with the classical goal of retributive justice, which is tightly focused upon the wrongdoer and attempts to calibrate his punishment to exactly fit his crime. In the retributive paradigm, improving effects upon onlookers are treated as welcome by-products, not the main event.

But equally, punishment viewed mainly as a deterrence strategy doesn’t fit with the liberal attitude to personhood. Pantomime displays of punishment pour encourager les autres dehumanize their targets and are meant to, turning them into edifying symbols for the masses. As with the ranks of shaven-headed prisoners in El Salvador, the visually humiliated figure becomes replaceable with any other warm body that would have done the same off-putting job. Steeped in the inheritances of 19th-century liberalism as we are, this is unpalatable even when applied to manifest wrong ‘uns — though reflecting on the likes of Huntley helps with the qualms.

And as Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish, there is another aspect of a deterrence strategy that unnerves modern minds: namely, the naked display of state power. Rather than public acts of violence carried out on behalf of a single strongman ruler, the 19th-century liberal mindset came to prefer judicial power to be distributed across many separate institutions and mechanisms. It also liked punishment to happen behind closed doors. This radical change — from hangings, burnings, beheadings, scaldings, skinnings, drawings, and quarterings, carried out in full view of the crowd, to more bloodless acts meted out behind prison walls — had two consequences, according to Foucault, and each of them seem highly pertinent to the present situation.

The first is that punishment, once hidden from the public gaze, left “the domain of more or less everyday perception” and entered “that of abstract consciousness”. In other words: most of us, liberated from any concrete knowledge about what goes on in the prison system, are free to imagine whatever we want about it, whether that involves outrageously cushy set ups or horribly brutal regimes.

And second: once displays had been abolished, what was officially supposed to discourage crime and to instill confidence in the general public was no longer “the horrifying spectacle of public punishment” but rather the “certainty of being punished”. And since these days there is in fact no certainty of being punished — except perhaps for placards or tweeting — it is not surprising that the system is on the verge of losing public confidence, nor that political opportunists are going for the Danny Dyer pantomime option instead.

Independence creates responsibility, and personal jeopardy. These then give rise, over time, to the good sort of institutional pride, and so to exactly the kind of “strong culture of ethics” noisily boasted of by organisations where it is so obviously absent.

Income has fallen by about 30% in 15 years. The Government rejects the Criminal Bar Association’s request for a 25% increase, and offers what it claims is 15%, but which really amounts to less. This will only apply to new work and not to the 60,000 cases in the backlog, which will take a year or two to complete. So by the time new trials are finished and paid, inflation will have annihilated the benefit.

Among the reasons given by the Government to the Chair of the Bar as to why any increase cannot be applied immediately, in line with their own report’s recommendation, is “software challenges”.

So on the surface, yes, it’s about money. Baby juniors’ income horror stories are well-known, and £50K for 50 year-olds in London — for banker hours and teacher stress — will not attract students of the first, or even the second, rank. But it would be wrong to insist that no one, or only the incompetent or wealthy, would do the job unless the money improves.

A profit-sharing corporate model could get the Government over the hump: subsidise the juniors’ income from the seniors’. Standards would fall, as there’s not much fat left on even the higher incomes, but at least no one would drown in debt while earning £10,000 a year. The real problem, though, would be the end of independence.

Barristers who work in the traditional way — that is, as members of a set of chambers, but self-employed — do not share profits. Instead, they are paid directly for the work they do. They chip in for clerks and an office — about 20% of gross income — but they do not have to chip upwards to a boss. This is of course different from the way solicitors operate: all their fees go to the partners, who then pay a proportion in salaries.

Now, profit-sharing — or labour-exploiting, if you prefer to see it that way — does not turn lawyers bent. Partners are responsible for the actions of their junior employees, and it is in a firm’s interests to maintain an ethical culture appropriate to their corporate structure. But there is something about the way things move in and around a criminal courtroom that makes them intractable to a corporate ethical culture.

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By Adam King

Anyone who has watched a criminal trial knows it is not all action. Longeurs almost comical to the unfamiliar are commonplace: a room full of people sitting in silence for half an hour, taking turns to glance about for something that might remind them what everyone is waiting for. But the blasts of activity, when they occur, are intense, and — importantly — unobserved.

A short private conversation with a client, opponent, witness, or police officer can suddenly shift the course of a trial. Usually these exchanges are not, and cannot be, written down. Promises must be kept, yet no one else can ever be sure what was said. So how is trust maintained? The answer is, by an ethical culture based on individual responsibility, and individual reputation.

Run into a friend at court, and you will soon be discussing each other’s opponents: in particular the extent to which they can be trusted. And despite great opportunity for short-term advantage through dishonesty — or perhaps because of it — it is rare to hear of serious ethical failure. Those who do cross the line become infamous and do not prosper.

An obvious counterexample is employed advocates: they are many, and play fair. But they are still in a minority, and so their culture, the culture in which they must try to succeed, is the culture of the independent Bar. Many of them come from its ranks,  and those who do not, but who want to build the respect required for advancing their clients’ interests, must adopt the prevailing ethical norms. “My boss said so” can never be a good answer to a judge’s question.

Of all the corollaries of independence that feed this culture of integrity, perhaps the most significant is the habit of most independent advocates to both prosecute and defend. The sometimes giddying sense of “I could have been on the other side of this” helps keep temperature low and probity high. Yes, there is increasing specialisation, but the majority keeps the right culture alive. With a mainly employed Bar, however, it would disappear, and the courts would soon thrum with the tribal attitudes of mutual distrust and moral disgust that we have found so inimical to justice on social media.

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There are foreign jurisdictions, of course, where integrity in criminal courts is high, and where advocates are not fully independent. But this will be thanks to their own professional culture and their own complex network of long-standing conventions. Just because they might manage without their independence does not mean we can do without ours.

And in fact, I suspect we do have something special over here, and not just in comparison with the obvious example of America. A recent Times piece on the strikes described us as an “extraordinarily kind” lot who only do the job “to help people”. Perhaps it’s the company I keep, but I wouldn’t personally put it quite as high as that. But while I may never find it difficult to tell the difference between my esteemed colleagues and, say, the volunteers at a children’s hospice, I am certain we are far more honourable than we are perceived to be — and that this has a substantial positive effect on what ultimately matters: trial outcomes.

Even putting justice aside, there is another important public good that depends on independence: efficiency. Independent counsel at court — with personal responsibility, personal jeopardy, and a personal reputation to consider — can often sort out in 15 minutes what a more corporate litigation process might take weeks to decide. That is not to suggest that the slow business of pre-trial litigation could be sped up by handing it over to barristers – on the contrary. But rather that there comes a time when they, and their independence, are required.

So why is the Government fighting? Simple short-termism and bloody-mindedness, no doubt, and because they do not believe the warnings. But also, I suspect, from the politician’s natural reluctance to pass up an opportunity to acquire power. The Bar is a small but significant national institution, whose members sometimes humiliate ministers with impunity. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Bar were weakened somewhat, made a little more biddable? Of course, destroying the independence of the legally aided Bar would not affect most Public Law practitioners, but there are not always bright lines between the two, at least not in the minds of the Government, and petty resentments are not always rational.

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By Adam King

I personally didn’t love the cries of “All Out” on the steps of the Old Bailey last week, or the cheers when the RMT turned up in solidarity. Theirs is a very different battle. Extreme strike rhetoric — with its menacing undertone of hostility towards “scabs” — is not, in my opinion, appropriate to a walk-out of the self-employed that will leave some defendants spending extra time in custody.

Yes it is the Government’s fault, and yes we are doing this to reduce this kind of outrage in the longterm. But nevertheless, a small number of Counsel, in particularly sensitive cases, are choosing to continue with their trials, despite their support for industrial action – and they must be respected. We are a “fees” profession, and if we do not want to become a “pay” profession, we should be careful not to behave like one.

The right of barristers to strike has been much discussed, and much advised on. The conclusions are vague. But what is clear is that the barristers participating in the walk-outs — unlike teachers, train drivers, or even doctors — are risking serious professional disciplinary sanction. Strength of feeling is not an infallible guide to the merits of an argument of course, but here they do coincide. And these are actions, not words — actions that have never been taken before. I cannot see the Bar backing down.

There is a well-known handful of barristers on Twitter who over the last few years must have damaged the profession’s reputation among Government even more thoroughly than among the public at large. This is not their fight. This is the fight of the inconspicuous thousands, who can give honest advice to a client, argue fearlessly with a judge, or carve a sensible deal with an opponent, without having to factor in the career-affecting demands of a line-manager or HR department. This is a fight any Minister of Justice should be happy to lose.

An investment of $391 million would address root causes of incarceration by funding mental health services, housing and rehabilitation, along with a programme named “Community Based Violence Reduction”. So far, so good. But the reforms would also redefine how victims and offenders should be dealt with, with increased funding to “restorative justice” in “serious felony level cases that would otherwise result in detention and incarceration”.

Restorative justice (RJ) is described as an alternative to prison; it is a non-punitive response to criminal behaviour. The idea is to bring together the person who inflicted the harm (the “responsible person”, in RJ terminology) and the victim, often in the presence of community representatives. The perpetrator is supposed to accept responsibility for the harm inflicted and reach an agreement with the victim about how to make amends.

De Blasio’s reforms were welcomed by prison reform campaigners, as well as pretty much every liberal in the State. Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes policy researcher at California State University and one of the few facilitators of restorative justice sessions for rape victims, has said that RJ, “allows survivors to have their pain heard and stories acknowledged, and is an opportunity for the person who caused the harm to be accountable for their actions”.

I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”. White himself, he is a newly trained lawyer in Washington DC, specialising in “replacing the racist system with a true healing process for both parties”. “Anti-rape feminists are probably responsible for more black men being incarcerated than anyone else in modern-day America”, he says. “Locking up African Americans is a product of slavery.” Ben went on to suggest “community resolution” and “non-violent strategies” to address sexual assault.

But for feminist activists campaigning against male violence, who have seen the consequences of the reforms up-close over the last three years, RJ constitutes the very opposite of justice.

Sarah, whose name I’ve changed, runs a support service for victims of male violence in NYC and is “appalled” that RJ is becoming a substitute for criminal justice sanctions. “What we are seeing is what we have seen forever”, she tells me, “which is the under-policing and under-protection for women, including women of colour. But some BLM activists are claiming that feminists calling for CJS sanctions for rape and domestic abuse is flat-out racist, because black men are overrepresented in the prison population.” As a result, she told me that “black and brown women, indigenous women … are the ones who are bearing the consequences of us not holding men accountable for their violence. They are the ones who are being murdered and raped and their abusers are walking free.”

According to the ideals of RJ, after a crime is committed the offender and the victim should meet face-to-face. The victim is not to blame or judge the perpetrator, but rather describe the impact of the offence, in order to “heal” and become “empowered”. RJ sees victim and perpetrator as equal, both in need of support and understanding. Supposedly modelled on the conflict resolution practices of certain indigenous cultures, there is much talk of circles. Healing circles are held for the perpetrator, before a sentencing circle takes place; later, there are follow up circles. The outcomes may include an apology or financial compensation. Some participants, including the victim, sign a confidentiality agreement.

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RJ is considered a suitable remedy for domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and sex trafficking, among other violent crimes predominantly committed by men. Most of these crimes are committed against women by men known to them: male family members, partners and colleagues. “The perpetrators have worked very hard, often for years, to condition the person they are abusing to not disclose, to minimise, to protect his emotions: to protect his character publicly”, says Sarah. “They’ve been using manipulative tactics to inspire self-doubt, blame and fear, in the person they are abusing.”

And victims of this kind of abuse may feel coerced by RJ practices, which are conducted, as Sarah said, “without any understanding of the dynamics of power and control, the impact of a trauma-coerced bond, and also the amount of time and commitment that it actually takes to elicit genuine behaviour change in abusers”.

I meet with Diane, whose name I’ve changed, at a café in Harlem, NYC. She was introduced to me by her rape counsellor. Diane was seriously sexually assaulted by a senior member of her church, having been targeted and sexually harassed by him for months. “I decided to report him to the police, despite the fact that my community is rarely well served by the cops.” Diane and the perpetrator are African American. “There are too many vulnerable young people in the church, and I didn’t see why he should poison the congregation.”

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The perpetrator, considered to be a man of “good character”, with no criminal convictions, admitted to the lesser charge of inappropriate sexual touching, denied committing serious sexual assault, and agreed to partake in RJ.

“I was contacted by the local service that runs these things,” says Diane. “They told me it was important that we reach an agreement and rebuild trust. I was told nothing could be gained from taking him on a route where he could end up in jail. It felt like I had no choice.”

But having read up on RJ, Diane decided not to participate in it. “I was judged and blamed by the service”, says Diane, “as though I should have accepted the scraps from the table and have him say ‘sorry’ or whatever. He got away with what he did to me, and a man like that pretending to regret what he did would just be lies.”

One report, published in 2016, is often used to justify replacing criminal sanctions with RJ. It is entitled “Restorative Practices in cases of Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Assault and Dating Violence: A Roundtable Discussion”. While it claims that RJ focuses on victims of violence and their needs, the report also ironically reveals who is actually centred in the process. One attendee is quoted as saying about perpetrators of male violence: “Do we actually blame them as a perpetrator when they were violated at a young age?”

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To be taken out of the criminal justice system and put in a situation where everybody is required to empathise with him — including his victim, who is forbidden from blaming or shaming him — is a violent man’s dream come true.

Like most on the Left, I believe that only the most dangerous criminals should be locked up. I have criticised the fact that the most vulnerable and disenfranchised are most likely to be in jail. But the campaign to end male violence is my life’s work. Victims have to come first. One service provider working with sexual assault victims describes reports from young survivors in California that they are “sick of going to rape circles”. She has also heard from women and girls of colour being pressured to engage in RJ instead of making police reports.

While RJ is not yet widely practiced throughout the US, it is growing in popularity in several states — and threatens to become federal policy. In its 2022 budget, the Office on Violence against Women requested $25 million, “to support restorative justice responses to domestic/dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking, and research, evaluation, and technical assistance related to such responses”.

The media consistently reports that research shows RJ is very successful. One paper, by Mary P Koss, is often cited. Koss asked victims to complete a survey about their PTSD symptoms before and after they engaged in RJ, and concluded that victims who complete an RJ process exhibit a marked decrease in those symptoms. But PTSD symptoms almost inevitably decrease as time passes after the traumatic event. Asking the victims and perpetrators of serious crimes to “hug it out and move on”, as Sarah describes it, was simply not shown by the research to be effective.

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I asked several experts on violence towards women if there is any reliable data about the efficacy of RJ and was met with a resounding “no”. When I spoke to Marcia, a veteran advocate for victims of male violence, she pointed out that in cases of domestic violence, putting the perpetrator and the victim in a room together is “outright dangerous”. Perpetrators of domestic abuse, and of sexual assault, are more likely than any other offenders to repeat their crimes — often against the same victim. But the well-publicised evaluations of RJ don’t include follow-ups that measure the recurrence of violence within domestic abuse scenarios.

Marcia asked for anonymity because “right now there is so much intolerance on the Left that even those of us who are part of the Left fear retaliation if we don’t conform.” She emphasised that rape victims want their rapists prosecuted, but with the Left advocating for RJ, victims “feel that there is no movement standing behind them. They feel utterly alone.”

The idea that serious, sexual and violent crimes should be dealt with by “community leaders”, outside the criminal justice system, is shockingly naïve at best. At worst, it is re-victimising women, and giving perpetrators a free pass. Liberal cities like New York are conducting an experiment with women’s safety and lives — and ignoring whatever they have to say about it.

On the night he took Poppy’s life, Atkinson had been drinking at a Christmas party. Fuelled by jealousy, rage and alcohol, he returned to the flat the couple still shared and stabbed Poppy more than 20 times. Atkinson told police that he had acted in self-defence after Poppy tried to attack him with a knife, a claim he later admitted was false. As such, on 17 January this year, he pleaded not guilty to femicide and the case was sent to court.

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The term “femicide” was only coined in 1974, by Diana Russell. There was, she insisted, no word to document the killing of females by males because they are female, even though this sort of violence was historically and culturally significant and far from uncommon. It is now the leading cause of premature death for women globally.

There was huge resistance from male academics at the time, who claimed the word was a bastardisation of the English language. Surely “homicide” did the job perfectly well? But this rather unspecific term didn’t distinguish the motivation and circumstances of this particular sort of deadly male violence from other homicides. And so femicide stayed.

According to Poppy’s mother, Julie, perpetrators of femicide are not deemed to be as dangerous as other murderers. “Some of the sentences handed out to these men are shocking,” she says. She should know. She has been campaigning to raise awareness about the effects of femicide on the loved ones left behind.

The court case was a nightmare for Julie and her family, not least because Atkinson was planning to plead not guilty to her murder. “The idea of him saying those words, ‘not guilty’ in court had me shaking and hyperventilating,” says Julie. Atkinson changed his plea to guilty at the last minute.

Poppy is one of more than 1,425 women recorded in the Femicide Census compiled by Counting Dead Women and the feminist charity NIA.

Back in January 2012, Karen Ingala Smith, chief executive of NIA, noticed several reports, day after day, of women killed by men. She began to count them and every year would published the names on her website. These would be read out by Jess Phillips MP in Parliament, and therefore recorded on Hansard.

In 2015, along with Women’s Aid, Ingala Smith published the first ever Femicide Report. It records and remembers the premature deaths of women and girls at the hands of men. It details the numbers of murders, the methods used and the contexts in which the women are killed — as well as their relationships with the men who kill.

This week, it published its ten year report — UK Femicides 2009-2018: “If I’m not in Friday, I might be dead” —  and, in its terribly powerful dedication, it lists every single one of those 1,425 women’s names.

Little has changed over that decade. Ten years ago, a woman died at the hands of a man every three days. It’s pretty much the same today. The murders have remained constant. However, the compilers of the Femicide Census are not prepared to accept that we should merely “be grateful that the numbers have not increased”. Instead, they describe the situation as one of the greatest public policy failures of the decade.

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Many of these tragedies could have been prevented. Almost half of the men who killed women during this 10-year period were known to have a history of violence against women, either the woman they killed or another woman or women. A number of the cases documented are subject to internal or external review into possible police failures or negligence.

In 2016, Dawn Rhodes was killed by her estranged husband Robert in the former family home. Dawn’s throat had been cut so deeply that she was partially decapitated. Rhodes had discovered that Dawn was having an affair with a colleague, and he had soon after met another woman on a dating website which Dawn had discovered, two days before she died.

This detail was relied upon in court which served to help convince the jury that Dawn was a spurned wife.

Rhodes claimed he acted in self-defence when he cut Dawn’s throat. The court heard that Dawn had confronted her former husband about his new relationship. During the row, Rhodes said, his wife grabbed a kitchen knife and made a “growling noise” as she “came at him at speed”. According to Rhodes, he “managed to disarm” Dawn and take the knife, which he then swung out once and slashed her across the neck, leaving a 13cm gaping wound.

Experts told the jury that it was more “plausible” that Dawn’s injury had been inflicted from behind as opposed to a frontal attack but, despite this, the jury found Rhodes not guilty of murder after 36 hours of deliberation.

Dawn’s name is there, at the beginning of the Report.

Dawn’s sister Kirsty Spencer now campaigns to end fatal male violence on behalf of her sister: “Through meeting feminists, I was able to find a voice,” she told me. “Dawn’s death gave me a justification to shout from the rooftops about what men do to women – the disgusting acts of male violence that are normalised and lead to the murder of women.”

“Domestic abuse is perceived as a ‘kerfuffle’,” she continues, referring to the case of Claire Perry. Perry was strangled to death by a police officer with whom she had been having an affair and who was later cleared of her murder. Which means that domestic violence isn’t perceived as being potentially deadly. “It is a disgrace that this is not seen as the crucial issue that it is.”

The majority of women in the report were aged between 26 and 55, accounting for 59% of all victims across the 10-year period. But sometimes the victims are horribly young: 3% were under 18 when they died.

Samantha Shrewsbury’s 17-year-old daughter Jayden Parkinson was murdered by her violent and controlling ex-boyfriend Ben Blakeley in December 2013. Jayden met Blakeley when she was 15 and he was 20. Immediately, Samantha was concerned about the rumours surrounding Blakeley. He enjoyed decapitating cats, for instance, and he had stabbed a boy in the neck with a Biro.

“I wanted to believe that these were just stories,” says Samantha. “But I did warn him that if he ever touched my daughter I would stand up to him. He spat in my face. From then on he kept her away from me.”

Jayden’s mother was right to be worried. Her daughter suffered violence and intimidation at Blakeley’s hands, only reporting him to the police after he threatened to post naked pictures of her online following their break-up. Then on 3 December 2013, Jayden called Blakeley from the hostel where she was living to tell him she was seven weeks pregnant. He became verbally abusive and claimed he was not the father. Blakeley demanded that she meet him face-to-face, and she travelled to Didcot to do so. When she failed to return that evening, hostel staff reported her disappearance to police.

Blakeley, who was known to be violent towards women, had previously been reported to police for attacking other girlfriends. He had thrown one ex-partner down the stairs when she was pregnant, and another ended up in hospital after he attempted to strangle her.

Jayden’s body was found 15 days after she disappeared in the grave of Blakeley’s uncle in Didcot. At trial, Blakeley claimed Jayden’s death was an accident, and that she had fallen and hit her head while he was strangling her.

“There were warning bells from when he was 12 years old,” says Samantha. “A social worker heard him say that if ever he murdered someone he would put them in somebody else’s grave so that they would mix up the DNA. That’s what he did to my Jayden 10 years later.”

Samantha is one of many grieving relatives I have spoken to who tell me they have found the Femicide Census both a comfort and a call to arms.

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“I just happened to see the list in the paper of all the women killed that year and Jayden was number 131,” says Samantha. “The fact that [Karen Ingala Smith] made Jayden not a number was what mattered. For me, that meant everything, that the census gave Jayden that voice.”

Samantha tells me what Jayden was like as a little girl, about her curiosity, her mischievous nature, and how close they both were. When Jayden first became involved with Blakeley, Samantha tried desperately hard to get police and social services involved, but to no avail. The lack of professional help was appalling, she says. Police thought she was a neurotic mum and rather than being vulnerable, Jayden was seen as “an obnoxious little bitch. I never got help, the authorities never saw this as a case of domestic violence. But their mistakes mean that our daughters, sisters, our mothers, women everywhere are dying today because nobody stopped these men.”

A subsequent report into the police failures found that errors had a detrimental impact on the investigation into Jayden’s disappearance.

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Today, Samantha is campaigning for a register, similar to the one for sex offenders, for men with a history of domestic violence. “It was obvious he was dangerous. If my Jayden had known what he had done to previous girlfriends, she would have given him a wide berth.”

Samantha does draw some comfort, though, from the fact that at least her daughter will leave a legacy that will help other women in abusive relationships as Jayden’s case was cited in the feminist campaign to introduce a law of coercive control.

So why, I ask Karen Ingala Smith, has the number of women killed by men in her report remained so constant despite the decades of feminist campaigning? “The scale of men’s violence against women in the country is huge,” she tells me. “We all know and yet people act as though it is somehow natural and inevitable.”  Because this violence is hidden in plain sight, men are not stopped in the early stages and women will end up dead at their hands.

For Poppy Devey Waterhouse, Dawn Rhodes and Jayden Parkinson it is too late. But there are countless women trapped in abusive relationships with potentially murderous men, with Covid making 2020 far more threatening for them. Who is thinking of these women? Who is calling these men to account?  Why is it only the feminists and the grieving relatives of the deceased who are left to honour the dead women and girls, and to demand justice from a broken criminal justice system?

If things were different — if every time a woman reported domestic violence, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service took it seriously, these deaths would dwindle. If the police took domestic violence seriously, particularly when multiple and escalating incidents were being reported, and took proper risk assessments, the perpetrator would be called to task before his violence became fatal. If the perpetrator knew that his actions would have serious consequences, that they could be viewed as a possible prelude to murder, he might think again before raising his fist.

So, yes, we should all be shocked, and we should all be angry. Male violence costs lives. Look at all those names at the beginning of the Femicide report. All those lives. Isn’t it time something more was done?

Which is all very well, but actually sort of nonsense. Yes, clients almost never confess while fighting a trial — and when they do the advocate will usually have to step away from the case. But the best answers to many tactical decisions, including how to cross-examine the other parties’ witnesses, vary according to the likelihood of guilt. A wise barrister will keep an eye on it.

And the truth is that defending an almost-certainly-guilty man can sometimes be difficult and unpleasant at first, depending on what he is supposed to have done. The early clouds of moral judgment tend to evaporate, though: feelings can be made to follow action, and there’s nothing quite like going in to bat for someone to make you realise that, deep down, they’re actually not so bad.

This is how criminal barristers of all political stripes come to inhabit, at least while they’re at work, an unusually non-judgmental shared moral landscape. You could argue about whether this tendency is best characterised as enlightened or psychopathic, but either way it’s why there is such limited enthusiasm in Crown Court robing rooms for the latest bit of knee-jerk canting from Home Secretaries and Justice Ministers.

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The Kafkaesque nightmare of British justice

By Jenny McCartney

Chris Daw QC is no outlier in this regard. His short new book, Justice on Trial: Radical Solutions for a System at Breaking Point, which is aimed at a general audience, does not suffer moralising lawmakers gladly. Policy announcements with judgmental overtones are variously described as “grandstanding nonsense”, “populist garbage”, “brazen ignorance”, “idiocy”, and so on. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that there are few things Daw dislikes more than moral judgment. A late chapter draws to a conclusion with the following:

“…I see these men and women, some grey and ashen from decades ‘behind the door’, others fuelled with anger, drugs and resentment, and I just cannot bring myself to judge them evil. I cannot place them in a cage marked ‘outsider’ and draw comfort from my own superiority, just because I am not one of those designated by society as ‘criminal’.”

One might cavil about moralising against moralising, but the sentiment is respectable enough. We are not the architects of our own characters; the extent of our inclination towards criminality is not something we have much — or perhaps any — control over. But even if we go full Sam Harris on Free Will and accept that every choice we make literally could not have been made any differently, we are still left with a lot of rapists and murderers that need locking up. So, what to do?

After a potted history of crime and punishment (the Romans, Magna Carta, witches) Daw embarks on the first proper chapter of four, “Why we should close all prisons”. Last year’s shocking report from the Chief Inspector of Prisons is briefly quoted — “The blood of another prisoner, who had self-harmed two days previously, had not been cleaned from the cell floor… Rubbish was left lying around in bags and there were problems with fleas, cockroaches and rodents” — but the meat of this part of the book is derived from a visit to a grim County jail in Alabama. While Daw may be right in saying that’s where we’re headed if we’re not careful, he does lay himself open to avoidable accusations of straw-manning, since powerful evidence is available closer to home.

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Pity the prisoners who remain locked up

By Carlo Gébler

That aside, while apathy towards prison conditions — and even towards its effects — is commonplace, few who take an interest in the subject could claim we are currently in the Goldilocks zone. But the question remains, how should we do things differently? Like the Scandinavian countries perhaps, whose well-funded, non-violent and rehabilitative systems are mentioned with approval? Not quite. The peroration begins as follows.

“I believe that the answer is simple. We should close down all prisons and start again. For the vast majority of inmates, locked up for non-violent crimes, incarceration […] – without question – increases rates of recidivism.

Non-violent criminals should never be sent to a prison of the kind that we have now. All of the Victorian and other traditional institutions, designed in a bygone age, should be closed down and turned into entertainment complexes or apartment buildings. Or razed to the ground once and for all.”

But does incarceration increase rates of recidivism “without question”? Compared with what? Never arresting anyone for anything? I’d be surprised if a judge could be persuaded to carry out a randomised controlled trial on the point, but I can’t help but suspect that, as Tom Chivers in these pages occasionally observes, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Daw’s much-trailed “radical solution”, to replace all the closed-down prisons, is then revealed: “Leave those convicted of most crimes in their own homes…we have the technology to monitor every breath, every heartbeat…” A visit to a London security Expo is described, and reference made — with what degree of approbation it’s hard to tell — to “a smiling and enthusiastic Chinese saleswoman, whose technology was by far the most sophisticated on display”.

“There is no doubt”, Daw goes on, “that we have the technology to provide a ‘virtual prison’ environment for every person who has become embroiled in the criminal justice system, which would allow an unlimited variation of restrictions and permissions so as to cater for each individual.”

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Abolishing the police is a cop out

By Mary Harrington

Quite apart from the fact that a criminal’s home environment will often contain its own collection of crimogenic influences, even if we do find ethically palatable technological solutions to replace some prison sentences we are still left with the problem of the rapists and murderers. Daw finally concedes that something with a “secure perimeter” is required, perhaps containing “shared houses”. “Prisoners would have access to medical care, addiction and mental-health services, counselling, and the opportunity to engage in productive work and education.” A properly funded prison, then. Is this really so radical?

Still, Daw is right to call for something different. Our prison system is a product of tradition and inattention, occasionally buffeted by politicians’ whims and their sometimes well-meaning attempts to appease angry voters. Perhaps the best proof of its current irrationality is its inconsistency.

A great deal of time and care is taken (still, just about) to ensure that a defendant is dealt with fairly and effectively from arrest to sentence, including much ink spilled over precisely how many months the sentence should be. But what he is actually then subjected to — that is, the aim of the whole endeavour — varies wildly according to geography and ever-shifting political expediencies. The newly convicted could get anything from rats and sexual violence to mere books-and-boredom.

Nevertheless, even if the custody bit were to be consistently applied, we still have to decide what prison conditions should be. Which would require us to consider what prisoners are actually for.

There’s incapacitation, of course. Taking criminals off the streets does have some effect, though research suggests you have to lock up an awful lot of people to achieve a relatively modest reduction in crime. Then there’s punishment, which Daw claims is an “illusory notion.” It’s hard to argue with the parents of a child killed by a drink driver — or the children of a pensioner defrauded of life savings — who tend to think the culprit should have at least a slightly hard time. People want criminals to be rehabilitated, yes, but it’s not the only thing they want.

Lockdown may have a lesson to teach us here. Even the substantial minority who opposed it complied with this extremely onerous restriction — not due to the vague possibility of a sixty quid fine, but because of social pressure and the threat of public humiliation. A fresh look at crime reduction could experiment with a bit of this; but ultimately I suspect we’ll stick to the punishments we’re used to.

And yet Daw’s “radical solutions” are offered just as the terms of reference for the first Royal Commission on Criminal Justice since 1993 are being fixed. We can only hope that prisons, and punishment more generally, are within its remit. How radical an overhaul the system needs isn’t obvious, at least not to me, but it’s certainly time that some proper attention were paid.

There is, however, perhaps no other author who catches so keenly the confusion and distress of individuals who have lost all confidence — and sense of their own rights — in a system that appears to be operating according to its own unknowable rules, which are riddled with failings so familiar that they are now factored into expectations.

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Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

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The Trial, in particular, is acutely relevant to our current age, in which our criminal justice system — once internationally renowned — is in a deepening state of crisis. Meanwhile, away from courts, informal ‘trials’ with inconstant rules and outcomes have become a frequent feature of both social media and company policy.

These latter ‘trials’ — although they lack legal force — nonetheless have the power to ruin a life: to destroy an individual’s reputation, to sink current and future prospects of employment, and in some especially bleak cases to push those involved towards suicide.

The Trial, written in 1914-15 and first published posthumously in 1925, begins with the line: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Thereafter, K. finds himself immersed in an interminable and terrifyingly hazy case in which he is the defendant. There is something particularly chilling about such an opening line, because precisely the type of event it describes is familiar from immediate UK history.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

The fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech has recently been jailed for perverting the course of justice — “telling lies,” indeed — by falsely alleging that a string of public figures were involved in a paedophile ring reportedly characterised by rape, torture and murder. Beech’s testimony was given weight by the senior police officer in charge of the investigation who declared his evidence “credible and true” on national television without awaiting the outcome of the ongoing investigation.

In the face of Beech’s unsubstantiated accusations, a lifetime of service to the state apparently counted for nothing. One of those accused by Beech was Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a hero of D-Day, who, in a searing recent interview with Dominic Lawson, described the circumstances of discovering that he was a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

He was having breakfast in March 2015 with his late wife Avril, who was then in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when two police officers arrived at the door. They said: “Accusations have been made.” He asked: “Against whom?” They answered: “Against you.” In Lord Bramall’s words:

“All they would tell me was that 40 years ago I had abused an underage male. And at that moment they showed me a warrant, and 20 policemen in overalls came in and they searched this house for 10 hours.”

His lawyer later found out the charges, which included the most lurid accusations, such as “supervising the torture of small boys on Salisbury Plain”.

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Why women are Carl Beech's real victims

By Joan Smith

Lord Bramall lived long enough to see Beech imprisoned, although his distressed wife did not. Nor did Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary: he died of cancer before hearing that his name had been cleared.

Paedophiles do exist, of course, and so do paedophiles in positions of public trust. Allegations from complainants need to be properly investigated. What distinguished the Carl Beech case from other cases – what made it worthy of a Kafka plot – was the willingness of the police to court publicity while openly abandoning due process and the essential principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

Those caught up in Operation Midland had both the misfortune and the good luck that it unfolded in the public eye. Misfortune, because their status amplified the pain and shame of being stained with such appalling allegations, and good luck because it ensured that the case was at least subjected to press scrutiny and their exoneration was decisively publicised.

Yet it begs the question: how many more injustices are routinely pursued, largely unseen, against those who have few resources with which to counter them? The protections of our criminal justice system have long been intended to guarantee that all accused are treated equally in the eyes of the law. But those protections have been steadily eroded on a number of fronts. Kafka’s imagined world creeps ever closer.

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The trial of Danny Baker

By Eric Kaufmann

In January this year, The Law Society submitted a parliamentary briefing on a “criminal justice system in crisis”, which it argues has been caused by “years of underinvestment and neglect”. The challenges it cited included increasing shortages of duty solicitors; a restrictive means test for legal aid; inefficiencies in the system; more and more courts being closed; and crucial evidence often not being disclosed.

To take but a single example, the role of criminal duty solicitor – the person you can call for professional advice if you are being held in a police cell – is now so badly paid that younger lawyers are refusing to go into it. The youngest duty solicitor on the Isle of Wight is now 55 years old. She is understandably concerned about what happens to the rights of suspects once she retires.

The rates that criminal barristers are paid for undertaking legal aid cases are often less than £100 for a day’s work, out of which they must pay travel costs and fees to chambers. Many are finding that – despite an extensive education, for which they have usually incurred sizeable debts, and working long hours – they cannot afford even a modest mortgage out of their professional salary.

Young barristers are therefore leaving crime work in their droves for commercial or corporate practice. There is no area of the law in which the stakes for the individuals concerned are so high; yet those lawyers who remain in criminal law see cases being postponed and court buildings and their machinery crumbling.

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I'm sick of fighting moronic culture wars

By Lionel Shriver

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the ongoing underpayment of criminal barristers and solicitors, the degradation of the infrastructure in which they operate, and the squeezing of public access to legal aid itself, is driven by an unspoken but resolute political intent. In one passage in The Trial, Kafka describes the surreal and miserable conditions in which the Advocates (those who represent defendants) work:

“It wasn’t saying too much if the Advocates called these conditions scandalous. Complaints to the authorities had not the slightest effect, and it was also strictly forbidden for the Advocates to make any structural repairs or alterations at their own expense.”

The narrative voice offers the reasoning for this situation:

 “Still, there was some justification for this attitude on the part of the authorities. They wanted to discourage defending counsel as much as possible, the whole onus of the Defence must be laid on the accused himself.”

Does this sound a fanciful translation from fiction, if applied to our current circumstances? Perhaps not when one considers a policy that is already in place, dubbed ‘the innocence tax’. Those who are above the threshold of legal aid funding – in the magistrates’ courts, anyone with an annual household income of £22,325, and in the crown court, above £37,500 of disposable household income – are currently compelled to fund their own defence privately, often at a considerably higher rate than legal aid fees.

Should they then be acquitted, however, the government will only reimburse them at legal aid rates (a deliberate policy: before 2012, they were allowed to claim back “reasonable costs”). This can leave people, after acquittal, with a large outstanding fee which in some cases has led to bankruptcy or the loss of life savings.

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Test article

By Jenny McCartney

The former Commons deputy speaker Nigel Evans experienced this personally, when he was acquitted of charges of rape and sexual abuse but lost his life savings in the fight to clear his name. He has since said:

“People don’t see people like me as victims, and there’s a sense that it could not happen to them. That’s what I thought too, but it’s completely wrong. There’s nothing easier than someone falsely accusing you of a crime.”

It has long been accepted that if one has the misfortune to be wrongly accused of a crime, a conviction is disastrous. Now, thanks to the ‘innocence tax’, so too might be the aftermath of acquittal.

Our legal system is the ultimate guarantor of individual liberty. It should be the last line of protection against the arbitrary persecution of the state, individual malice, and the passing mores or prejudices of wider society. The law should be broadly immune to contagious emotions or fashionable ideology.

Today, legal independence seems more necessary than ever, as the shifting traps of judgement and taste that are laid by social media – the complex blurring of private and public life – can have life-altering consequences for the unwary.

In June this year, for example, a 54-year-old disabled grandfather, Brian Leach, was fired from his job at Asda for posting an anti-religious skit – which mocked both Christianity and Islam – by the comedian Billy Connolly on his Facebook page. Asda, which itself sells Billy Connolly DVDs, said that he had breached the company’s social media policy. Leach was summarily dismissed, despite having deleted the post and apologised for any potential offence to colleagues.

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Tolkien's guide to contemporary politics

By Peter Franklin

That the behaviour of the police can also be influenced by perceived public mood was evidenced by Operation Midland: it is widely thought that the misplaced eagerness to find Beech’s testimony “credible and true” was in part a reaction to the bad publicity generated by the acknowledged previous failure of the police themselves to investigate sexual abuse allegations properly in relation to Jimmy Savile and others.

Recently the police also appear to be taking a worryingly keen interest in patrolling lines of opinion and argument – resulting, for example, in a bizarre case being brought earlier this year by West Yorkshire police, Essex police and the CPS against Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, for ‘harassment’ allegedly motivated by ‘transphobia’. It is worth noting that while Yardley, the defendant, was and is transsexual, the complainant was not trans, but a ‘trans ally’: the origin of the complaints was a spat on social media.

District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case against Yardley in a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence, and awarding costs to the defence. In his blunt summary: “There is no case and never was a case,” something that neither the police nor the CPS were apparently able to perceive within a ten-month investigation.

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By Eric Kaufmann

Meanwhile another recent development has been worrying solicitors, who witness clients increasingly trapped – like the unfortunate Josef K. – in a legal limbo without apparent end: the rapid rise of the phenomenon of ‘released under investigation’ (RUI). Criticism of the pre-charge bail system – in which suspects were endlessly bailed and re-bailed without their case being resolved – led to bail being widely replaced with RUI.

This is arguably much worse: unlike with bail, there are no fixed calendar dates whereby suspects can discover the progress of their case. Instead, a suspect’s relationships, studies or career must be placed on hold while the case stagnates or inches forward. The suspect will be notified at some point of the case’s direction, but he or she will have no idea of exactly when that might be, and nor are the under-resourced police under any formal obligation to tell them within a given time-frame.

When the Law Society Gazette ran an article on RUI recently, anonymous solicitors spoke below the line of their own experiences. One read: “I’ve had one client RUI for 25 months and counting and the case is not yet even at the stage of being sent to the CPS for a charging decision. That will be a minimum of another four months, so the case might yet break the three year mark in due course.” It goes without saying that such delays also grievously affect the lives of complainants.

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By Jenny McCartney

For those of us who are not routinely involved with the criminal justice system, such stories crop up troublingly and drift away again. They do not touch our lives – until one day, perhaps, they do indeed affect us or our loved ones, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet something is going profoundly awry with the justice system in the UK, and if it is not understood and addressed as a coherent picture – which it is – it will have deeply corrosive and long-lasting effects. Start, if you like, with reading or re-reading The Trial, and then listen out for its many echoes today.

Those echoes keep on coming, right up until the miserable moment of Josef K.’s death. Two men in frock coats and top hats come for him eventually, officials of the state with malign intent, and K. asks himself: “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court to which he had never penetrated?”

One man holds him down, one stabs him, and then K. watches them watching him die: “’Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.”

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By Douglas Murray

Well, we must all be wary of hysteria and exaggeration. Frock-coated officials are certainly not stabbing suspects to death in the UK today. Yet still those stubborn little echoes persist – “like a dog!”.

An inquest jury concluded this July that the death of Rafal Sochacki, a 43-year-old Polish national, on 21 June 2017, was most likely due to him being subjected to excessive heat. Sochacki had been arrested on an extradition warrant and was being transported in a prisoner-escort services van, a task outsourced to the private company Serco, on one of the hottest days in central London for over 40 years.

The van stopped outside Charing Cross police station, holding Sochacki in a cell inside the vehicle for 50 minutes with the engine and air conditioning turned off. He was then taken to court at 10am, soaked in sweat, and put into a very hot, unventilated cell: the air conditioning at the court had not worked for weeks, and mobile air-conditioning units were proving ineffective.

Rather like K., in fact, he never got to see the judge or the court. Having been noted as behaving oddly and erratically, he was finally found unresponsive in his cell at 2.45pm, having died of severe heatstroke and hypertensive heart disease.

And it is strange, because when I read about the circumstances of Sochacki’s death, my very first thought was that there might have been a greater public outcry if a dog had been treated in this way.

Kafka, like Orwell and Dickens, belongs to that select band of authors whose name has become an adjective. “Kafkaesque” is a term most often used to describe an overweening bureaucracy or system that traps an unwitting individual in an illogical, nightmarish maze, governed by complex forces beyond his or her control. I suspect that as Kafka is more widely and heavily evoked as an adjective, the detail of what he wrote is less frequently considered. We think we know what he says. We’ve got the gist.

There is, however, perhaps no other author who catches so keenly the confusion and distress of individuals who have lost all confidence – and sense of their own rights – in a system that appears to be operating according to its own unknowable rules, which are riddled with failings so familiar that they are now factored into expectations.

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Who takes advantage of disadvantage?

By Jenny McCartney

The Trial, in particular, is acutely relevant to our current age, in which our criminal justice system – once internationally renowned – is in a deepening state of crisis. Meanwhile, away from courts, informal ‘trials’ with inconstant rules and outcomes have become a frequent feature of both social media and company policy.

These latter ‘trials’ – although they lack legal force – nonetheless have the power to ruin a life: to destroy an individual’s reputation, to sink current and future prospects of employment, and in some especially bleak cases to push those involved towards suicide.

The Trial, written in 1914-15 and first published posthumously in 1925, begins with the line: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Thereafter, K. finds himself immersed in an interminable and terrifyingly hazy case in which he is the defendant. There is something particularly chilling about such an opening line, because precisely the type of event it describes is familiar from immediate UK history.

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How social media is creating dangerous legal precedents

By Jenny McCartney

The fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech has recently been jailed for perverting the course of justice – “telling lies,” indeed – by falsely alleging that a string of public figures were involved in a paedophile ring reportedly characterised by rape, torture and murder. Beech’s testimony was given weight by the senior police officer in charge of the investigation who declared his evidence “credible and true” on national television without awaiting the outcome of the ongoing investigation.

In the face of Beech’s unsubstantiated accusations, a lifetime of service to the state apparently counted for nothing. One of those accused by Beech was Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a hero of D-Day, who – in a searing recent interview with Dominic Lawson – described the circumstances of discovering that he was a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

He was having breakfast in March 2015 with his late wife Avril, who was then in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when two police officers arrived at the door. They said: “Accusations have been made.” He asked: “Against whom?” They answered: “Against you.” In Lord Bramall’s words:

“All they would tell me was that 40 years ago I had abused an underage male. And at that moment they showed me a warrant, and 20 policemen in overalls came in and they searched this house for 10 hours.”

His lawyer later found out the charges, which included the most lurid accusations, such as “supervising the torture of small boys on Salisbury Plain”.

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Why women are Carl Beech's real victims

By Joan Smith

Lord Bramall lived long enough to see Beech imprisoned, although his distressed wife did not. Nor did Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary: he died of cancer before hearing that his name had been cleared.

Paedophiles do exist, of course, and so do paedophiles in positions of public trust. Allegations from complainants need to be properly investigated. What distinguished the Carl Beech case from other cases – what made it worthy of a Kafka plot – was the willingness of the police to court publicity while openly abandoning due process and the essential principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

Those caught up in Operation Midland had both the misfortune and the good luck that it unfolded in the public eye. Misfortune, because their status amplified the pain and shame of being stained with such appalling allegations, and good luck because it ensured that the case was at least subjected to press scrutiny and their exoneration was decisively publicised.

Yet it begs the question: how many more injustices are routinely pursued, largely unseen, against those who have few resources with which to counter them? The protections of our criminal justice system have long been intended to guarantee that all accused are treated equally in the eyes of the law. But those protections have been steadily eroded on a number of fronts. Kafka’s imagined world creeps ever closer.

Suggested reading

The trial of Danny Baker

By Eric Kaufmann

In January this year, The Law Society submitted a parliamentary briefing on a “criminal justice system in crisis”, which it argues has been caused by “years of underinvestment and neglect”. The challenges it cited included increasing shortages of duty solicitors; a restrictive means test for legal aid; inefficiencies in the system; more and more courts being closed; and crucial evidence often not being disclosed.

To take but a single example, the role of criminal duty solicitor – the person you can call for professional advice if you are being held in a police cell – is now so badly paid that younger lawyers are refusing to go into it. The youngest duty solicitor on the Isle of Wight is now 55 years old. She is understandably concerned about what happens to the rights of suspects once she retires.

The rates that criminal barristers are paid for undertaking legal aid cases are often less than £100 for a day’s work, out of which they must pay travel costs and fees to chambers. Many are finding that – despite an extensive education, for which they have usually incurred sizeable debts, and working long hours – they cannot afford even a modest mortgage out of their professional salary.

Young barristers are therefore leaving crime work in their droves for commercial or corporate practice. There is no area of the law in which the stakes for the individuals concerned are so high; yet those lawyers who remain in criminal law see cases being postponed and court buildings and their machinery crumbling.

Suggested reading

The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the ongoing underpayment of criminal barristers and solicitors, the degradation of the infrastructure in which they operate, and the squeezing of public access to legal aid itself, is driven by an unspoken but resolute political intent. In one passage in The Trial, Kafka describes the surreal and miserable conditions in which the Advocates (those who represent defendants) work:

“It wasn’t saying too much if the Advocates called these conditions scandalous. Complaints to the authorities had not the slightest effect, and it was also strictly forbidden for the Advocates to make any structural repairs or alterations at their own expense.”

The narrative voice offers the reasoning for this situation:

 “Still, there was some justification for this attitude on the part of the authorities. They wanted to discourage defending counsel as much as possible, the whole onus of the Defence must be laid on the accused himself.”

Does this sound a fanciful translation from fiction, if applied to our current circumstances? Perhaps not when one considers a policy that is already in place, dubbed ‘the innocence tax’. Those who are above the threshold of legal aid funding – in the magistrates’ courts, anyone with an annual household income of £22,325, and in the crown court, above £37,500 of disposable household income – are currently compelled to fund their own defence privately, often at a considerably higher rate than legal aid fees.

Should they then be acquitted, however, the government will only reimburse them at legal aid rates (a deliberate policy: before 2012, they were allowed to claim back “reasonable costs”). This can leave people, after acquittal, with a large outstanding fee which in some cases has led to bankruptcy or the loss of life savings.

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By Timandra Harkness

The former Commons deputy speaker Nigel Evans experienced this personally, when he was acquitted of charges of rape and sexual abuse but lost his life savings in the fight to clear his name. He has since said:

“People don’t see people like me as victims, and there’s a sense that it could not happen to them. That’s what I thought too, but it’s completely wrong. There’s nothing easier than someone falsely accusing you of a crime.”

It has long been accepted that if one has the misfortune to be wrongly accused of a crime, a conviction is disastrous. Now, thanks to the ‘innocence tax’, so too might be the aftermath of acquittal.

Our legal system is the ultimate guarantor of individual liberty. It should be the last line of protection against the arbitrary persecution of the state, individual malice, and the passing mores or prejudices of wider society. The law should be broadly immune to contagious emotions or fashionable ideology.

Today, legal independence seems more necessary than ever, as the shifting traps of judgement and taste that are laid by social media – the complex blurring of private and public life – can have life-altering consequences for the unwary.

In June this year, for example, a 54-year-old disabled grandfather, Brian Leach, was fired from his job at Asda for posting an anti-religious skit – which mocked both Christianity and Islam – by the comedian Billy Connolly on his Facebook page. Asda, which itself sells Billy Connolly DVDs, said that he had breached the company’s social media policy. Leach was summarily dismissed, despite having deleted the post and apologised for any potential offence to colleagues.

Suggested reading

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By Sam Leith

That the behaviour of the police can also be influenced by perceived public mood was evidenced by Operation Midland: it is widely thought that the misplaced eagerness to find Beech’s testimony “credible and true” was in part a reaction to the bad publicity generated by the acknowledged previous failure of the police themselves to investigate sexual abuse allegations properly in relation to Jimmy Savile and others.

Recently the police also appear to be taking a worryingly keen interest in patrolling lines of opinion and argument – resulting, for example, in a bizarre case being brought earlier this year by West Yorkshire police, Essex police and the CPS against Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, for ‘harassment’ allegedly motivated by ‘transphobia’. It is worth noting that while Yardley, the defendant, was and is transsexual, the complainant was not trans, but a ‘trans ally’: the origin of the complaints was a spat on social media.

District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case against Yardley in a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence, and awarding costs to the defence. In his blunt summary: “There is no case and never was a case,” something that neither the police nor the CPS were apparently able to perceive within a ten-month investigation.

Suggested reading

Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

Meanwhile another recent development has been worrying solicitors, who witness clients increasingly trapped – like the unfortunate Josef K. – in a legal limbo without apparent end: the rapid rise of the phenomenon of ‘released under investigation’ (RUI). Criticism of the pre-charge bail system – in which suspects were endlessly bailed and re-bailed without their case being resolved – led to bail being widely replaced with RUI.

This is arguably much worse: unlike with bail, there are no fixed calendar dates whereby suspects can discover the progress of their case. Instead, a suspect’s relationships, studies or career must be placed on hold while the case stagnates or inches forward. The suspect will be notified at some point of the case’s direction, but he or she will have no idea of exactly when that might be, and nor are the under-resourced police under any formal obligation to tell them within a given time-frame.

When the Law Society Gazette ran an article on RUI recently, anonymous solicitors spoke below the line of their own experiences. One read: “I’ve had one client RUI for 25 months and counting and the case is not yet even at the stage of being sent to the CPS for a charging decision. That will be a minimum of another four months, so the case might yet break the three year mark in due course.” It goes without saying that such delays also grievously affect the lives of complainants.

More from this author

The woman who haunts the IRA

By Jenny McCartney

For those of us who are not routinely involved with the criminal justice system, such stories crop up troublingly and drift away again. They do not touch our lives – until one day, perhaps, they do indeed affect us or our loved ones, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet something is going profoundly awry with the justice system in the UK, and if it is not understood and addressed as a coherent picture – which it is – it will have deeply corrosive and long-lasting effects. Start, if you like, with reading or re-reading The Trial, and then listen out for its many echoes today.

Those echoes keep on coming, right up until the miserable moment of Josef K.’s death. Two men in frock coats and top hats come for him eventually, officials of the state with malign intent, and K. asks himself: “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court to which he had never penetrated?”

One man holds him down, one stabs him, and then K. watches them watching him die: “’Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.”

Suggested reading

How we warp our moral code for genius

By Douglas Murray

Well, we must all be wary of hysteria and exaggeration. Frock-coated officials are certainly not stabbing suspects to death in the UK today. Yet still those stubborn little echoes persist – “like a dog!”.

An inquest jury concluded this July that the death of Rafal Sochacki, a 43-year-old Polish national, on 21 June 2017, was most likely due to him being subjected to excessive heat. Sochacki had been arrested on an extradition warrant and was being transported in a prisoner-escort services van, a task outsourced to the private company Serco, on one of the hottest days in central London for over 40 years.

The van stopped outside Charing Cross police station, holding Sochacki in a cell inside the vehicle for 50 minutes with the engine and air conditioning turned off. He was then taken to court at 10am, soaked in sweat, and put into a very hot, unventilated cell: the air conditioning at the court had not worked for weeks, and mobile air-conditioning units were proving ineffective.

Rather like K., in fact, he never got to see the judge or the court. Having been noted as behaving oddly and erratically, he was finally found unresponsive in his cell at 2.45pm, having died of severe heatstroke and hypertensive heart disease.

And it is strange, because when I read about the circumstances of Sochacki’s death, my very first thought was that there might have been a greater public outcry if a dog had been treated in this way.