Our Jaqquiiieeeee is going to bring in laws ‘in days’ to (re)allow anonymous witnesses in court.
Now, I’m no lawyer, but how in holy hell does that work? Let us assume the plod accuse you of nicking an apple. I approach plod and tell them that I actually saw you nick the apple, but I am so very scared of you I will only give evidence anonymously.
The problem is, you are innocent, and I’m a liar (I don’t much like you, see, because you once slept with my wife). Now, if your defence council were able to establish who I was, they would be able to ask around and find out that at the time I claim I saw the great fruit crime, I was, in fact, in the local brothel getting my oats. But your lawyer can’t be allowed to know who I am, so they are left pissing in the wind, with an anonymous witness who presumably gives evidence from behind a blacked out screen or something, lending an air of menace to you and making the jury more likely to convict.
Surely, for any conviction to be ’safe’, you must have the right to know the identity of your accusers, so that you may research and dismiss any false evidence, and bring out into the open any possible grudges?
Or, does it not work like that?
Filed under: BBC / Nu Labour alliance, plod & law
Yes, that’s exactly how it works. That’s why they have a witness protection programme in the USA. Of course, in Britain the authorities would leave the addresses of all the protected witnesses on a train…
I would rather look at it another way - if no one is prepared to stand up and be counted against a criminal then he can’t be that bad.
It’s a difficult one. Witnesses need to come forward as many cases fall apart without them, but like yourself I can’t help feeling that someone somewhere might take advantage.
[...] June, 2008 by landedunderclass It is clear that some (such as Harry Haddock at Nation of Shopkeepers) share my view of the witness anonymity [...]
In their very detailed judgement the law lords noted that even Diplock had qualms about anonymous witnesses in NI and, in the event, didn’t allow them. The Gardiner Committee inquiry into the Diplock courts said that “the very serious limitations they [anonymous witnesses] would place on effective cross-examination would imperil the whole concept of a fair trial, and the committee regarded this, as the Diplock Commission had done, as a conclusive argument against such measures.”
Given whose behind the proposed change in the law, we can rest assured that this affair will end badly in a botched piece of questionable legislation which will be used for far more than just the banging up of violent scrotes who, after all, may be innocent.
“who’s” not “whose” of course