Undercharged

If you are beastly to one or more of your fellow humans, there is a spectrum of charges that can be laid against you, depending on the degree of your beastliness :-

1) War Crimes - for this you will be flown to the Hague to face a trial lasting years at the International Court of Justice. Although the way things are going, this may become the next offence deemed suitable for disposal by means of Fixed Penalty tickets and police cautions.

2) Murder and Manslaughter - I think we all know about these. Go to the Crown Court and spend a fair chunk of your remaining lifetime inside.

3) Grievous Bodily Harm (GBH) - almost as bad as murder if done with intent. The less severe cases (section 20) do occasionally arrive at the Magistrates' Court, but typically these deserve more jail-time than a Magistrate can impose.

4) Actual Bodily Harm (ABH) and Battery - two offences relating to hurting or injurying someone in a way calculated to interfere with the victim's health or comfort. In general this involves the victim sustaining at least some severe bruising. Severe cases can lead to sentences up to 5 years in prison.

5) Common Assault (section 39)- this is the most thumbed part of a Magistrate's guidelines. It includes all manner of "Did You Spill My Pint???!"/"What you lookin' at ??!" after-pub incidents involving minimal injury. At most this is 6 months in prison - but more usually it's a fine/community penalty.

One Common Assault case I dealt with involved a woman throwing a doner kebab at her ex - so we're not talking about hardcore criminal behaviour here.

But ... I saw a serious domestic violence case recently involving a sustained assault on multiple people in front of children. The injuries seemed easily to justify a charge of ABH but I was gobsmacked to see that the charge was only Common Assault.

The accused jumped at the chance to plead guilty - which reduces the maximum sentence to four months, which means in practice that they will spend at the very most 8 weeks in prison.

Pretty well any sentence we came out with under those circumstances was going to look candy-assed and totally unfitting to the crime.

But forgetting the Magistrates and the victims, this strategy would seem to be a winner for quite a number of interested parties:-

Offender : under-punished
Jails : less overcrowded
CPS : successful, quicker, cheaper prosecution
Government : statistics on serious assaults reduced

I've got a sinking feeling that undercharging assault will become increasingly irresistible, and that this won't be the last time I will have to hand down a kebab-thrower sentence for a wife-beater crime.

Every Night You Cry

The Barnardo's report "Every Night You Cry" is difficult reading, especially for Magistrates. It contains some really heart-wrenching stories from the children of prisoners, showing how locking up their parents affects them.

The part where I stopped being quite so supportive is where they propose the following:-

" measures put in place for courts to have information on the impact on the children of a defendant of any sentence they may make"

To me this pushes the blame for the suffering of children onto the nasty Magistrates, when the blame properly belongs with the criminal parents, who should have thought about the effect on their families before doing the crime.

I've put a total of three people in prison in the course of my year so far, and in all of these cases the person had numerous warnings and last chances but still persisted in offending to the point where custody became inevitable. Should I really have thought "Hmmm - this one's got kids - she gets a curfew. But that one hasn't - he goes down" ?

Bad people should go to prison when they do bad enough things.

That's not something that should be changed - but I do hope that the State and charities like Barnardo's work out a way to cushion the blow for the kids.

Joke ?

"Say what you like about servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we're going to have a f***ing good paralympic team in 2012."

I was going to have a bash at commenting on Jimmy Carr's recent attempt to squeeze humour from the plight of limbless squaddies, but the guys 'n' gals at ARRSE (the Army Rumour Service) have more right to comment and they do it much better than I ever could. Follow their link here.

Oh, what the heck, I'm a blogger, so I have a licence to rant about stuff I don't fully understand:-

The only problem I have with the joke is that it's lazy. It's very obvious and not particularly incisive - Oscar Wilde it aint.

The comment on ARRSE that he probably got it from a squaddie at Selly Oak hospital is probably not far from the truth. In fact he was probably told much worse while he was there - far too near-the-knuckle for public consumption. For example, there's a squaddie on ARRSE who adds the line "Can you imagine the scene when the starting gun goes off?". Now that would have dug him a properly deep hole.

You see, people who work in dark places have dark humour, and that humour no longer works when an outsider lifts that humour from its proper context and plonks it down into a happy Manchester Apollo.

If a wounded soldier had told the joke, it would have been a killer - it would have been their show of defiance and courage. But when a millionaire comedian squeezes it in between the knob-gags, then no wonder the joke falls flat.

And anyway, today a soldier from the Black Watch died from his wounds six weeks after being blown to pieces in Kandahar. As far as I know Jimmy Carr didn't send him out there and Jimmy Carr didn't plant an improvised explosive device by the roadside. So why is it that people seem to be more cross with Jimmy Carr than with the whole range of people more deserving of our rage?

To BNP or to not BNP - that is the Question Time

Yes, let's allow the potato-faced fascist onto Question Time.

But, let's choose the rest of the panel carefully :-

(1) Al Murray's "Pub Landlord" character ("Where would we be if we had no rules? France! And if we had too many? Germany!")
(2) Ali G ("... is it cos I is black ?")
(3) Sam Kelly's character Captain Hans Geering from "'Allo ' Allo" ("Heil Hitler ! .... Clop !")

HIghs and Lows

You get to see the best and the worst of human behaviour as a Magistrate.

Take today for example.

"The best" was an experienced Magistrate who glossed over his high-flying career, his charity work and his twenty years on the bench. What he really wanted to talk about was his severely disabled foster-child who is about to start semi-independent living after years of struggling against multiple disabilities and bone-headed bureaucracy. He was so proud of her, and wouldn't hear of it that he and his wife had done something phenomenal to get her to this stage.

"It's just what you do", he said.

Then we left the retiring room and we met his polar opposite.

Slack-jawed and slouching, she had never held down a job in her forty-something years. She had, however, seemingly made a career of accumulating just about every variety of fine, from TV licence evasion via drunk and disorderly to a mediumly-shocking driving offence which also required that she pay compensation to her victim. There were probably a few overdue library books too.

She had been allowed to pay off her dues at £10 per week and in the last eight years she had paid a massive total of £20 out of £2,000. When she was pursued by the Fines Office, she had dropped off the radar and moved house and binned her mobile. She probably thought that that was that, but eventually she was picked up by police on another matter, all these outstanding warrants against her came to light, and she was bundled unwillingly into our courtroom.

You and I, if we were ever in the situation of being unable to pay a fine would have made contact with the court, told them what was happening and would have tried to negotiate some alternative. We would certainly have given up drinking, smoking, partying until we were quits. And the Fines Office and the Courts do fall over themselves to be flexible in cases of genuine hardship and where honest attempts are being made to discharge the debt.

However, going on the run while sticking your fingers in your ears singing la-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you is a completely different matter. In my pre-magistrate days, I was convinced that short prison sentences were useless and that only violent offenders should go into custody. But you tell me what else you're supposed to do with someone unsuitable for a community sentence who has persistently defaulted on fines. Fine them again ?? Yeah, right.

She was led away, crying exaggerated tears of self-pity. In my previous life this would have affected me, but not now. My overwhelming emotion in her case was of relief that an eight-year overdue debt to society had finally been settled.

Like I say, it was an eye-opener for me to see such a contrast. To be reminded one minute that there are still heights of humanity to which I can aspire and then to see how far it is possible for someone to fall.

P.S Please note that I do try to avoid the above analysis when it comes to sentencing. The oath I took was to deal with everyone in a consistent manner, "without fear or favour, affection or ill-will." So, everyone gets the same treatment, regardless of my (imperfect) judgement of a particular individual's moral fibre.