An absolute cornerstone of the law is that a person accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty. Accused, arrested, charged and put in the dock, you are still not guilty of the crime until a jury of your peers has heard and seen the evidence against you and the defence your solicitor has made, and decided that the evidence against you convinces them beyond reasonable doubt that you did the Bad Thing.
Anyone who has any problem with that is a buckethead. Mistakes happen; even when it seems pretty clear that A did something awful to B, it might not actually be true. B could be a liar, or mistaken. Yet there are still plenty of people who will insist that, even after being acquitted of doing a Bad Thing, A probably did do it, really. So being accused of a crime is a pretty horrible thing. The fact that being accused of a crime now seems to be a cue for the tabloids to declare open season on your life, your family, friends, career and personal habits is also a pretty horrible thing. Just ask Christopher Jeffries or Colin Stagg, convicted of murder by the press rather than in a court of law and forever portrayed as dangerous and evil when both were wholly innocent and the crimes they were accused of later proven to have been committed by other people.
So it probably doesn't seem all that unreasonable to call for anonymity to be granted to those accused - but not yet convicted - of rape. Michael LeVell has been acquitted of rape but only after the papers had a gleeful rampage through every aspect of his personal life; alcoholism, infidelity and, for all I know or care, the odd overdue library book. As he is innocent according to the law, it's considered a bit much that his reputation has been so comprehensively trashed and now, apparently, an awful lot of people are going to carry on thinking that there's no smoke without fire and anyway he's got weird eyes so he must have done something, etc.
However, there is a bit of a problem when it comes to conflating the fates of those accused of murder and those accused of rape, and the problem is that, in a rape case, the victim is there, in court, and able to name the person - had already, often repeatedly, named the person who committed the crime. In a case of murder by a stranger, or by someone outside of the immediate family, there's often quite a lot of room for error on the part of the police. The murder victim, being dead, is unable to name the criminal or pick him/her out of a lineup. The victim of rape who chooses to press charges is alive, is a witness to the crime and much less likely to be mistaken. (Yes, sometimes a victim is mistaken as to the identity of the attacker; that is one of many reasons why a person accused of a crime has the right to trial by jury. Etc.)
So there is, actually, a very good case for preventing the media from naming - and subsequently mounting an attack on every aspect of the life of - an individual accused of murder. There's a good case to be made for restricting the tendency of the press to rummage round and snark about the personal life of those accused of a crime to the extent that the accused has been convicted of the crime by the media before a trial occurs. There's a case for reminding the tabloid press that newspapers are not the equivalent of a jury.
Showing posts with label tabloids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tabloids. Show all posts
Saturday, 14 September 2013
Friday, 7 December 2012
Tough shit love, you're now a footnote.
It's not known, yet, how Jacintha Saldanha died. It's just really not very likely that she killed herself because she was tricked into Betraying The Future Queen. She may have died of natural causes, she may have taken her own life for reasons personal to her and nothing whatsoever to do with the Royal Pregnancy. But that hasn't stopped a worldwide frenzy of bucketheads pooing with rage and demanding PUNISHMENTS. Morons everywhere are insisting that a couple of daft DJs 'have her blood on their hands' and 'should be jailed'.
It doesn't take that big or ill-fitting a tinfoil hat to think that this is a press frenzy with purposes that have nothing to do with the unfortunate Saldanha. Firstly, you've got the assorted rich and powerful types embroiled in the Murdoch empire's phone-hacking business, who would all like the peasants to stop fussing about a little bit of corruption among their betters. Murdoch did his best to create a climate of fuckwitted, spiteful, unthinking sentimentality that could be channelled in whatever direction best suited the interests of him and his mates: such an environment demands a ready supply of both scapegoats and sacrificial victims. News International mixed the two categories up once too often and have been brought close to destruction by the machinery they created - the whole resevoir of slobbering outrage they created suddenly got unleashed on them when they were proven to have done harm to the individuals they built into talismans of 'innocence' and 'hope'. And now all of a sudden there's an opportunity to redirect all that not-very-clever emotional incontinence at someone else: two immature and thoughtless radio performers. They can be recast as symptoms of Everything That's Wrong, labelled as all-but-murderers. Everyone, go and hate them. If you don't hate them, you don't.... CARE.
Of course, it wouldn't have arisen at all if not for the idea that Kate Windsor being up the duff is something that matters.
To most sensible people, it's about as important as hearing that your work colleague's cousin's mate is pregnant and suffering from a pregnancy-related illness. She's in hospital with hyperemesis gravidum? Oh dear, poor girl, that's nasty. Anyway, have you seen my stapler? But to the admittedly loose-ish consortion of The Powerful, that's not a useful attitude. People have to be made to understand that royalty, like celebrities, are important and must be worshipped, and that to laugh at them or take little notice of them is wrongful thinking. And now look, look! Some naughty peasants tried to take the mickey and SOMEONE'S DEAD BECAUSE OF INSUFFICIENT REVERENCE.
Poor Jacintha Saldanha. She was a person with a life and a narrative of her own. If her death actually was suicide, it would most likely have been for reasons that mattered to her: imminent bankruptcy, her marriage breaking up, having been diagnosed with a terminal illness... any number of things could have mattered to her a lot more than one particularly wealthy and well-connected patient at her workplace. However she died, however important she was to her family and friends, she's now the Nurse Who Killed Herself Over Kate Windsor, and her death's been co-opted by the media and quite possibly the government as a symbol of the most imaginary evils of the modern world - satire and silliness.
It doesn't take that big or ill-fitting a tinfoil hat to think that this is a press frenzy with purposes that have nothing to do with the unfortunate Saldanha. Firstly, you've got the assorted rich and powerful types embroiled in the Murdoch empire's phone-hacking business, who would all like the peasants to stop fussing about a little bit of corruption among their betters. Murdoch did his best to create a climate of fuckwitted, spiteful, unthinking sentimentality that could be channelled in whatever direction best suited the interests of him and his mates: such an environment demands a ready supply of both scapegoats and sacrificial victims. News International mixed the two categories up once too often and have been brought close to destruction by the machinery they created - the whole resevoir of slobbering outrage they created suddenly got unleashed on them when they were proven to have done harm to the individuals they built into talismans of 'innocence' and 'hope'. And now all of a sudden there's an opportunity to redirect all that not-very-clever emotional incontinence at someone else: two immature and thoughtless radio performers. They can be recast as symptoms of Everything That's Wrong, labelled as all-but-murderers. Everyone, go and hate them. If you don't hate them, you don't.... CARE.
Of course, it wouldn't have arisen at all if not for the idea that Kate Windsor being up the duff is something that matters.
'pic originally from The Onion'
To most sensible people, it's about as important as hearing that your work colleague's cousin's mate is pregnant and suffering from a pregnancy-related illness. She's in hospital with hyperemesis gravidum? Oh dear, poor girl, that's nasty. Anyway, have you seen my stapler? But to the admittedly loose-ish consortion of The Powerful, that's not a useful attitude. People have to be made to understand that royalty, like celebrities, are important and must be worshipped, and that to laugh at them or take little notice of them is wrongful thinking. And now look, look! Some naughty peasants tried to take the mickey and SOMEONE'S DEAD BECAUSE OF INSUFFICIENT REVERENCE.
Poor Jacintha Saldanha. She was a person with a life and a narrative of her own. If her death actually was suicide, it would most likely have been for reasons that mattered to her: imminent bankruptcy, her marriage breaking up, having been diagnosed with a terminal illness... any number of things could have mattered to her a lot more than one particularly wealthy and well-connected patient at her workplace. However she died, however important she was to her family and friends, she's now the Nurse Who Killed Herself Over Kate Windsor, and her death's been co-opted by the media and quite possibly the government as a symbol of the most imaginary evils of the modern world - satire and silliness.
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