A Very British Kind of Justice

Something is rotten in the British Justice system.

Like most ordinary law abiding citizens I’d always assumed that the British Justice system was here for me, to keep me safe from false accusations and punish the guilty criminals. That is until I actually experienced it.

Last summer my then sixteen year old brother was badly beaten up at a party by a gang of ten guys. He’d been walking down a corridor, a lad pushed into him and started shouting at him, he shouted back, the guy started to threaten him so he walked away. Ten minutes later, not wanting to ruin the party for his friends he decided to go back in and say sorry.

He was immediately hit in the face, heard saying by a room full of witnesses ‘what are you doing I’m trying to apologise’ before being thrown to the ground and receiving kicks to the head and face. His jaw was broken in three places and his ribs and back were badly bruised. If his friends hadn’t intervened and pulled him out of there they would have carried on kicking. It would have been a lot worse.

What followed was the irksomely slow process of interviews and statement taking. An identity parade didn’t take place until a month later by which time, given that he’d never seen his assailants before that night, his memory was already not the sharpest and he was only able to identify one of his attackers, the boy who had first shoved in to him, first hit him in the face and first started kicking.

Over a year later we were finally told that a trial had been scheduled and he’d need to come in and give evidence, I went with him to offer my support.

Naturally, given the weight of evidence and the room full of witnesses my family and I were expecting a quick, simple trial followed by a conviction. Wrong.

From the moment we got there I knew something was off. The only two witnesses testifying were girls who hardly knew my brother and the third, an actual good friend of his, hadn’t shown up and the court were forced to issue a summons.

It quickly became apparent that they had been being threatened by the defendant and his friends. One girl had even received a text showing a photo of her statement, illegally taken by the defendant after he’d been shown it in a meeting with his solicitor, showing her name and address and the words ‘if you come to court you’re dead’.

The police response? As he'd sent it to a friend, who had then sent it to her there was nothing they could do, despite the fact that only he could have taken the photo.

It emerged that this ‘boy’ was already well known to the police, although never convicted of any priors, for his involvement in drug dealing, petty crime and violence, including against former girlfriends.

The witnesses were so terrified they asked to be given screens so he couldn’t see their faces during the trial, but that didn’t stop the crown court telling us all to go for lunch at the same time, resulting in them having to walk past the defendant while he was smoking outside.

And this is just the beginning. The first five hours of court were devoted to talking about such important issues as ‘what order to call the witnesses in now one hasn’t shown up’ and whether a policeman had a door open or shut behind him as he’d asked a witness a question (fun fact, court sessions cost the country £2000 per hour).

Then, after 6 hours of waiting, my brother was called as a witness. We got all the way upstairs to the court door before being told, actually the prosecution had changed the order without telling anyone, completely going against the order that had been debated over for hours that morning, and had actually asked for a different witness.

A present policeman commented that the barrister that my brother had been assigned (in crown prosecutions you don’t get a choice over who prosecutes your case) is known for funny turns, ambiguous questions and unfathomable behaviour.

In the end we were sent home and told to come back the next day. My brother was called as a witness the next morning.

Still, despite the incompetence of the court we were still thinking ‘It’s an air tight case, good witnesses, evidence of intimidation, what can go wrong?’ a lot apparently.

In the end the far more capable defence made it appear that each of the witnesses had placed the defendant in slightly different places in the room, making it unclear whether he was actually responsible for my brother’s really quite serious injuries. No one bothered to mention that the event had taken place over a year ago, all of the witnesses agreed he was responsible and a chief attacker and no one’s memory is film footage perfect, especially after that length of time.

The end result was a hung jury. In about a year my brother and the girls who’ve been so terrified by this process will have to go through it all over again. And for one of them this gang know where she lives.

As the policeman who was talking us through the process stated; ‘justice isn’t a balance, it’s entirely in favour of the defendant, no one talks about the rights of the witnesses’.

Soon after I heard about an acquaintance of mine whose mum had been badly beaten by his stepfather. His stepfather had walked free from court. Why? Because the only witnesses were the acquaintance and his mother, and he was known to have a problem with his stepfather so his testimony was discounted (ignoring the fact that this ‘problem’ stemmed from his stepfather regularly beating up his mother). She has now had to move to another town after receiving physical threats.

The current Crown Court system treats victims abysmally. It makes already emotionally distressed people sit in small, airless rooms for hours and hours whilst the court wastes time and money on pedantic issues before throwing them to the mercy of the defence who we were warned employ psychological tricks and go out of their way to make you appear confused. It allows scared victims to come face to face with their attackers outside the court and then allows brutal aggressors to walk free without consequence whilst victims and witnesses are left vulnerable to their retribution.

I understand the need to ensure that innocent people aren't convicted but there is no denying that something is rotten in the British Justice system. And it’s innocent people who are suffering for it.