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Fade Me Out
Sep. 5th, 2006 09:37 pmPeople 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.
+++++++++
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.
++++++++++
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.
++++++++
Someone in the music world whom I actually recognize. Walking towards me in Wardour Street this afternoon, unbothered by anyone, Mr Noel Gallagher.
+++++++++
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.
++++++++++
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.
++++++++
