Fade Me Out

[peterbirks]

People spotting 2006, Wardour Street.

Someone in the music world whom I actually recognize. Walking towards me in Wardour Street this afternoon, unbothered by anyone, Mr Noel Gallagher.

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The Online Evening Standard today had a poll in rather poor taste and rather poorly put together.

"Should we let Ian Huntley die?" it asked, in response to the news that he had taken a drugs overdose.

The poll was badly constructed because, well, there are several reasons why someone might answer "yes" or "no", which means that no conclusions (or, in the case of the Evening Standard, any conclusion they like) can be drawn from the result.

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Back when Barry Bulsara/George was convicted of the murder of Jill Dando I wrote in Greatest Hits that this had all the makings for one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent times. Well, it's been five years, but the BBC finally seems to have caught up with me. It doesn't require an IQ of 150 to work out that a high-profile murder carried out with what looked like clinical efficiency was likely to result in the police looking for any likely candidate on whom they might get a guilty verdict, and anti-social criminal-record-holding living-nearby Barry George probably came up at the top of the list at the local nick.

I doubt that the police actually said to themselves: "hell, we haven't got a chance in hell of catching the real killer, so let's fit up this bloke". Self-deception is a wonderful thing and many a miscarriage of justice has been a result of a sequence of inactions rather than of a conspiracy to defraud. Right the way up to a jury who would have felt that to deliver a not-guilty verdict would, in a sense, let down the police, the public, and the beloved Jill Dando herself. Anyone who has sat on a jury will know that the last thing you can expect from twelve-good-men-and-true is a dispassionate analysis of all the evidence.

I haven't watched tonight's BBC programme on the affair, but I have little doubt that it will put forward points that were blindingly obvious at the time - the main one of which being that a tosser like George probably couldn't organise himself sufficiently to collect his dole money on time, let alone carry out what was obviously a professional assassination organised by people who knew what they were doing.

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Comments

Giving a stuff

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced one way or another but I struggle to care quite so much about this one. Weren't there forensics on him that put him in the frame as well?

But my civil liberties must be slipping. I can't help but think he's probably better off where he is than out in the community. And it's not that hard to commit a clinical murder - we've all seen enough CSI and the like to be aware of how to achieve this. It's having the mental disconnection that permits you to kill someone. Once you can conceive of that being possible, the mechanics of it aren't hard.

Re: Giving a stuff

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't really give a shit about it; the only thing that annoys me is the self-righteousness of "the other side" where "the other side" consists mainly of incompetent bureaucrats who would rather let an innocent man die in jail than suffer a minor reprimand for being completely bloody useless.

I'm a grave disbeliever in the "certainty" of the men in white coats. The man in the street might not think that there is any difference between a one in a thousand chance and a one in a billion chance, but anyone who has read some fairly simple books on statistics and probability will know that the two numbers can mean the difference between a man being probably innocent and a man being probably guilty. However, forensics is as forensics does, and I believe that it is this area of evidence that has recently had doubt cast upon it.

I know what you mean when you say that it's the emotional disconnect rather than the technical difficulty that is the major "hurdle" that an efficient killer needs to overcome, but in this case you have a person who is quite likely to have upset a number of people who would be willing to hire professional hitmen, and the murder was undertaken in such a way as to make one suspect that the killer wasn't doing this kind of thing for the first time. The "style" just wasn't that of a no-hope drifter.

PJ

[simong-uk.livejournal.com]

I sat on a jury about the same time as the Dando case. We had a split decision, which led to this absolute corker from a guy in his sixties:
"Well I say not guilty, but if enough of you want to say guilty, I will go with that and then I can be out on the golf course this afternoon."

The 5-year stretch attached with the verdict seeemed inconsequential...

Justice

[(Anonymous)]

I share your cynicism about the British justice system and its ability to miss the blindingly obvious. In the 1970's I attended several days of the Widgery enquiry into "Bloody Sunday". The accounts given by the soldiers into how, when and why they fired their bullets were totally laughable, which didn't stop Widgery finding them totally credible of course. My "favourite" was the guy who said he fired 13 rounds at a terrorist with a rifle who kept bobbing up to fire and every time he did our hero shot at him. Now I know the Irish are supposed to be a bit dim, but if a trained soldier was shooting at me with a self loading rifle I wouldn't be doing to much bobbing up and down like a fairground target.

The government have of course now spent hundreds of millions demonstrating that Widgery (who went to his grave lauded with honours) was a whitewash, which anyone with half an eye knew in the first place.

Unfortunately there are all too many similar examples.

Brian Frew