Out of Court

From "The Guardian"

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Magistrates object to on-the-spot driving fines plan

Concern that fixed-penalty fines will make police 'jury and sentencer'

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This is the Magistrate Association objecting to a plan to allow police to deal with minor careless driving offences with an on-the-spot fine and three points on the licence.

As I've mentioned before, a lot of the Magistrates Association's output makes me cringe. This is no exception.

If being "jury and sentencer" is a crime, then all magistrates are guilty. We establish guilt and we hand down the sentence and no-one seriously thinks that's an issue when we do it.

And anyway, the police aren't sentencing - they are handing out a fixed penalty notice that the recipient can refuse to accept if they wish to have their day in court.

Personally, I can't see what's wrong with the plan. Traffic offences (with a guilty plea) at the lower end are in any case a question of doing the sums from the guidelines, multiplying by the offender's fictional wage from the means form and swiping the offender's plastic.

I really can't put my finger on what value a court case would add.

And I can definitely see the costs.

This plan would :-

* Speed up the application of justice

* Cut financial costs

* Take pressure off the overloaded CPS

* Avoid dragging police off duty to attend court

I'm a Magistrate because I care about the criminal justice system. If I need to lose some of my "turf" to make it better, then I'm not going to whine.

The way I see it, we should be working with the police rather than seeing them as Competition and guarding our powers out of blind jealousy.

Kick Off

Finally - the football season is under way. Even watching your team capitulate in the rain in the opening game doesn't dampen that good feeling.

All summer long - these so-called sports, these mere pastimes : cricket, tennis, rugby. I ended up pretending to know nothing at all about them in order to stop people trying to discuss them with me.

"Hey, Stan - first Ashes test today !"
"Oh is it ? What teams are playing ?"

"Hey Stan, do you think Murray's going to win"
"Nah - guy can't take a punch. Probably lose by a knockout in Round 8"

There is only one sport - don't even try talking to me about any other. The best contest in any other half-sport is inferior to any football game. Not just any Premiership game - it's inferior to any soccer game, whether played by amateurs, women, children, in wheelchairs, five a side, on a beach or on top of a mountain.

I can't describe just how much better I'm feeling - football is here and this season will run into a World Cup summer, so basically we're at the start of around 20 months of non-stop football.

Life is good - and once Bolton work out how to get to the ball to a striker once in a while, it will get even better.

Florida man blames cat for illegal downloads

I just thought this was a marvellous example of the application of "beyond reasonable doubt" in criminal trials.

Sure, the cat might have done it - but 1000 images ?

Corfu Curfew

Many would see me as a card-carrying member of the Liberal Elite - a Guardian-reading muesli-munching do-gooder.

And most of the time you would be 100% correct.

However, there are occasions when events in court turn me into "Angry of Tunbridge Wells".

Like the case of the woman who missed going to jail by a whisker and ended up with an all-you-can-eat buffet of punishments, one of which was a curfew.

"Curfew ? Like with a tag ?" she said, when she should have been leaving the court backwards expressing her gratitude to us for not banging her up.

"Yes. With a tag." the chairman explained "That's how we know that you are actually at home when you're supposed to be".

In reply she started waving a plastic folder and making crazy eyes at her brief, who suddenly remembered something and stood up.

"Your Worships, I apologise. I should have said something before, but my client has booked a foreign holiday in two weeks time and respectfully asks that the curfew requirement be suspended for the week they are away and for the week to be added to the end of the sentence."

That's the point where my inner Tabloid Editorialist woke up.

"How dare you ! You want to slouch off to Greece for some Sun, Sea and Sex while your victim is barely out of hospital ! You make me sick ! You should thank your lucky stars you're not in prison - and the loss of your holiday should be a blooming lesson to you."

But of course that's not what's happening. The day before the flight, the electronic tag comes off so she can go to the airport without setting off all sorts of alarms. Then she can lie on the beach and not come back with a tag-shaped white splodge on her ankle spoiling her all-over tan.

I guess it was within our powers to insist, but I suspect very rarely do Magistrates object. If we were jailing her, we wouldn't have taken account of her holiday plans, so why should we with a curfew ?

The Hand That Signed The Paper

Dylan Thomas' poem tells of the impersonal mighty power of the hand that holds the pen that signs the document that ... etc. etc. ...

My hand hardly "felled a city", but it did have an eventful session in court recently.

First up, a local butcher had fallen well short of the hygiene laws and was in big trouble with Environmental Health. The tainted meat products had been confiscated and it was down to us to order their destruction. We were offered the chance to inspect them, but just looking at the photos were enough to convince us. In fact they were bad enough to turn the three of us vegetarian on the spot.

And so, with the stroke of a pen, meat was declared unfit and sent off for destruction.

Weird - when I heard the clerks talk about "all the pork pies downstairs", I assumed they were using cockney rhyming slang.

Before the next case, a constable needed a search warrant signed. He had some excellent reasons and so the document was signed. In this case, I did it personally. My scrawl with a borrowed biro meant that someone in a neighbouring big city is going to have a bunch of size twelve boots coming their door one early morning soon. It's a strange feeling signing such a document.

There followed a series of complex and rather stressful cases. So complex in fact that we twice had a split decision, the second one of these was my first experience of being outvoted.

That case involved a man suffering with a variety of mental illnesses, who committed crimes on three separate occasions while on a Suspended sentence. The theory with suspended sentence is that it is activated if you mess up even once. I thought three times was plenty, but my colleagues were swayed by his fragile mental state, so we gave him a curfew, which given his reported agoraphobia probably wasn't that much of a punishment.

The day ended around four and I went home with a sledgehammer headache. Some days I feel a toaster could sit in my seat and the outcome would be the same.

That day though, I honestly felt that I made a difference.