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Allegations of abuse
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Home / police allegations / Rickards,
Shipton, Schollum vs Jane Doe Page 5 - Further Reaction to
Not Guilty Verdict |
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Don't hold this against me, but
once, for about five minutes, a long time ago, I was a lawyer. I try never to
bring this up. It's in my past, and people look at you differently when they
find out. All I can say is I was young and I needed the money. Like Anna
Nicole Smith in her lap-dancing days, I was doing what I could to pay the
bills. And the truth is, I've probably spent more hours in my life cleaning
cars at Avis, or pretending to smile at people at McDonald's. And nobody ever
asks if I still do that. So, when the news broke that two
of the accused policemen in the rape trial were already in jail for a
separate rape, I felt a twinge in my long-atrophied legal synapses. This is
the same synapse that tingles whenever I drive past a speed camera and wonder
if the mud on my licence plate looks natural. If type-size on a headline is a
measure of emotion, this week's story was jaw-dropping, posse-gathering,
noose-tying stuff. I've never seen any word written as large as
"GUILTY" was in Friday's NZ Herald. I'm not sure what size that font
was, but I wonder if 9/11 or World War II scored headlines that big. Probably
the last time anyone used this size of type in If the headline had been spoken
aloud, you'd call noise control. The sheer scale of its black inkiness shows
what happens when you're made to suppress something for so long - it doesn't
go away. It just builds up. And now the truth is out there. Should the juries in this trial
and the Louise Nicholas trial have been told? Well, of course not. Duh. What do you think juries would
have made of it? Well, look at the public reaction.
The size of headlines. This is precisely why it shouldn't
have been told to the jury. To quote that great legal mind,
Jack Nicholson: "You can't handle the truth." People, above all, are emotional.
We tend to work backwards from an emotional reaction, to choose facts that
justify our gut. Search your feelings: you know this to be true. You read
articles in the newspaper that you agree with and skip ones you don't. I remember how I felt when I first
received the Louise Nicholas pamphlet. Good grief (to put it mildly). I
wanted to tell everyone. Talk about juicy. Two men on trial for rape -
policemen at that - are already doing time for a separate rape! They must be
guilty of this one too! Surely you don't need a law degree
to know this legal principle: no smoke without fire. You don't get arrested by the
police for nothing. I didn't learn this at law school.
For all I know, this is the actual rule, but I never took Evidence (classes
were at 8am). As the legal dictum goes: say no more. No further questions.
The student rests. To state the plainly obvious, just
because someone did something once, doesn't mean they did it on a separate
occasion. I don't think anyone can disagree with this as a principle. But I tell you what, you're sure
gonna look at them differently. And it's precisely the people
crying out for previous convictions to be revealed to the jury, the folks who
are outraged, who add two plus two, who are the kind of people who would find
themselves on a jury. Unsophisticated people who haven't worked out how to
get off jury service. And if the accused show up in
prison outfits, with handcuffs on, they might well look at all the evidence
differently. (I imagine for the two men already
convicted and doing time, it's a bonus to be charged with another rape. If
nothing else, you get to put on a suit, have your hair styled and spend a day
out being called Mister.) If we need any faith in the
current system, the fact is the two cops already in jail managed to get
jailed without that particular jury knowing about any separate charges they
were facing. I'd say the real moral is this -
get rid of juries. Just let judges decide who's telling the truth. Juries let
off OJ and MJ. No smoke without fire. |
