Golliwogs, Delays and the CPS

It’s not for me to comment as to whether the placing, last October, of a golliwog in Mrs Jenna Mason’s window constituted behavior likely to cause racially-aggravated harassment but what does concern me, yet again, is the shear ineptitude of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mrs Mason was charged by the police, on the advice of the CPS, on the 2nd September and on the 7th of September a police spokeswoman said: "We have had a complaint from a member of the public, we have investigated it and both the Crown Prosecution Service and ourselves have agreed there is enough to prosecute."

Yesterday, at Lowestoft Magistrates' Court, Chris McCann, head of the complex casework unit at the East of England Crown Prosecution Service, offered no evidence in a hearing lasting less than five minutes when he is reported to have told the Court that “a review has been carried out at the highest level” and that there was not “a realistic prospect of conviction”.

Now if that is the case what has changed, what further evidence has come to light to alter the view held by the CPS on the 2nd of September?

I suspect that nothing has changed and the CPS has belatedly done what it should have done much sooner and not waited until the day of trial, in the hope that Mrs Mason would plead guilty, to drop an unwinable case.

Love Barnsley

The Daily Mail (well I suppose it would have to be) has taken exception to a District Judge at Barnsley objecting to defendants calling court staff ‘love’.

http//www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2051798/Judge-accused-discrimination-ban-Yorkshire-defendants-calling-court-staff-love.html

Now I’m a Yorkshireman born and bred but I too have, on various occasions, instructed those before the court not to call the court clerk ‘love’, an almost automatic reaction in my part of the world.

Well that must make me also guilty of discrimination against traditional Yorkshire dialect if Graeme Garvey of the Yorkshire Dialect Society is to be believed. I prefer to think of it as an expression of good manners not to use a familiarity to those you don’t know, especially one with overt sexist overtones.

The Art of Sentencing

Last week I sentenced my first case of ABH (assault occasioning actual bodily harm) under the new sentencing guidelines.
Generally speaking, the new guidelines have down-graded assault cases, especially the most frequent, that of common assault, but for ABH the sentences have been substantially increased.

The starting point for the case I was involved with, a single unprovoked head-but causing no lasting damage, is 26 weeks imprisonment.

In the retirement room a strange dichotomy emerged; while generally we, on our bench, have bemoaned the down-grading of common assault cases, having to impose community penalties where previously we would have been considering jail, we also, on this occasion, were reluctant to send the perpetrator of the ABH to prison.

But we can’t have it both ways. If we are to follow the guidelines, and the law says we must unless we have good reasons not to and that it would be unjust to do so, we have to follow the intentions of the Sentencing Council which are clearly to increase sentences for the most serious assaults, including ABH, and to reduce those for the more minor cases.

In the event, we gave the defendant every mitigation - first offence, discount for a guilty plea, and that any prison sentence should be as short as possible but we still sent him to jail for 10 weeks. In many ways it was a compromise decision, but that’s often the case and it was a sentence we all could live with. I understand he intends to appeal the sentence and it will be interesting to see what the Crown Court has to say about it.