A senior immigration judge said yesterday that Qatada could be released despite even his own defence team suggesting that he posed a “grave risk” to Britain’s national security.

‘Coz there’s rules, see?

We get to jail you if we’ve tried you and found you guilty of a crime: something that was a crime at the time you did it. You get tried in front of a jury, see the evidence against you, get to argue against said evidence, have represenatation and etc. Doesn’t matter whether you’re a former Cabinet Minister charged with perverting the course of justice, a kiddie fiddler or suspected of being a mass murdering terrorist.

We also get to put you in jail if we’re going to charge and then try you but we think you’ll run away before we do…..and in a very small number of cases, if we think you’ll nobble witnesses.

And that’s actually about it. We don’t get to stick you in a high security jail just because we suspect you’re a bad ‘un. No, not even if you’re suspected of being a terrorist mastermind.

Extradition makes it all a little murkier: some who are to be extradited get bail as they’re not flight risks (nor witness nobblers). Some are regarded as flight risks and don’t. But if we’re not going to extradite the bloke as we wouldn’t allow the evidence in our own courts…..extracted by torture we think, thus tainted….then that doesn’t apply either.

It’s tempting to think that with a real bad ‘un we should throw all of this away so that we can all sleep safely in our beds. But, you know, to be really honest about this? I sleep much more safely in my bed knowing that I cannot, on the basis of information extracted by torture, be declared a bad ‘un and thus locked up indefinitely.

Remember, these rules are not here to protect the Abu Qatadas of this world. They are there to protect us, the citizenry, from the authorities.

Which is why I sleep safer in my bed of night: if the rules will protect some scumbag like him then they’re going to protect me, aren’t they?

I much prefer this system to the American one where suspected bad ‘uns are dumped on an island in the Caribbean…..don’t you?

The corporation had said there was an overwhelming case for the court’s intervention because of the impact on the churchyard of the camp. The limited interference with the protesters’ rights entailed in the removal of the tents was justified and proportionate, given the rights and freedoms of others, it argued.

There’s a trade off of rights here, the courts are adjudicating that trade off.

“The freedoms and rights of others, the interest of public health and public safety and the prevention of disorder and crime, and the need to protect the environment of this part of the City of London all demand the remedy which the court’s orders will bring,” said Lindblom in his lengthy judgment. The City had no “sensible” choice but to take action.

Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, said juries should be allowed to consider the fact a victim had been unfaithful as a possible provocation – in defiance of a new law that banned it as an excuse.

How did we end up with a law that said that such infidelity could not be used as a (partial) defence? Which part of Labour thought that up?

They dismissed two but upheld the appeal by Jon-Jacques Clinton, who was jailed for life, with a minimum of 26 years, after killing his wife, Dawn, at their home in Bracknell, Berkshire.

The couple, who had two children – now aged 13 and 12 – had separated two weeks before the 2010 killing.

The day before her death Mrs Clinton, a dinner lady, told her husband she was having an affair with Tony Montgomery, who she had met online.

Clinton later discovered had regularly posted lurid comments about sex on the internet, including one on the day of their daughter’s birthday.

When he confronted her about the infidelity, Mrs Clinton taunted him saying “it should have been like that every day of the week” and that she had slept with five men and gave graphic details.

She also “sniggered” after discovering he had been looking at suicide websites, adding “it would have been easier if you had, for all of us”.

Clinton, a building site manager, was also under pressure at work and was worried how to cope with two children without her after a 17-year relationship.

He attacked her with a lump of wood and strangled her.

The point about murder is that you have to plan to kill someone. And when trying to work out whether someone was planning to do so it is necessary to look at all of the events that led up to the event.

Note that no one at all is suggesting that we have a Latin style creme passionelle*,  where having been cuckolded there is a right to hunt down and kill the participants in the two backed beast. Only that there is a difference between planning to kill someone and killing someone after provocation.

Also note that the man is not now to be set free, this is not a “not guilty” verdict**. It’s been sent back for retrial. A jury will now decide whether that provocation is indeed a defence to a charge of murder. They being the right people and the right place to make such a decision.

Finally, note what’s really interesting about the case. This isn’t, as I’m sure some will see it, the judges over ruling the lawmakers. This is the judges saying that the law is a lot more complicated than the lawmakers seem to realise. There are conflicts and trade offs throughout the system. The various needs to nail the guilty, spare the innocent, provide for fair trials to distinguish between the two and so on. And that complex web isn’t quite as amenable to the will of Parliament as some lawmakers seem to think. The general rules about, as in this case, fair trials, the defences that can be mounted, count more than a specific line item in a piece of legislation.

It is much more important that it is possible to mount a defence for a jury to decide upon than it is that a majority of 635 people have voted to not allow a specific line of defence.

This is, writ small, one of the larger problems of our time. Vide Vodafone: Parliament’s direct will in the matter may well be that the CFC rules hold. But having gifted jurisdiction to the EU courts on such matters that doesn’t really matter any more. Abolishing the Lord Chancellor and then having to reinstate him in a different guise as so much of the basic law demands that we have someone named as the Lord Chancellor. Doesn’t have to be Speaker of the Lords, but there does have to be a Lord Chancellor.

In short, the world is more complex than the pygmies who rule us understand it is.

* As Corporal Nobby Nobbs puts it.

** Well, I suppose you could view it that way. Not guilty as tried and convicted so far as the original judge ruled out that provocation by sexual infidelity defence. But you know what I mean.

But in 2005 a chink of light emerged when the double jeopardy rule was abolished, meaning the men could be re-tried.

Double jeopardy is one of our protections against them. Us as citizens against those who would rule us.

The abolition of it leaves us open to continual prosecution: if they don’t manage to get a jury to convict us first time they can just try and try again.

This is a very good example of why hard cases make bad law. That racist murderers go to jail, Hurrah!

That all 65 million of us are stripped of a protection in order to do so, Booo!

Seven years after a statutory instrument updating nature regulations glided virtually unobserved through Westminster, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has this week admitted it “unlawfully” put a new crime on the statute books.

The unintended outcome of the rarely deployed Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 Amendment Regulations, Statutory Instrument (SI) 1487/2004, has been shot down by lawyers’ persistent questioning.

Quincy Whitaker, a barrister at Doughty Street chambers, London, and Nigel Barnes, a solicitor at the Sunderland and Newcastle firm Ben Hoare Bell, realised that a parliamentary drafting error had accidentally removed a previous defence and laid in its place, cuckoo-like, a constitutionally impossible crime.

The regulations, meant to harmonise UK bird protection rules with EU laws, made illegal the possession of wild eggs collected from 1954-1981. Police and wildlife agencies used the new regulations to prosecute a number of people.

The change in the law was never the subject of public consultation, neither was it debated in parliament. The retrospective criminalisation of historic collections has caused museums, scientific research organisations and private collectors to the risk of prosecution.

Yup, through a statutory instrument they introduced a retrospective crime.

“The House of Lords had specifically rejected the creation of the offence which the amendment regulations in fact created when the original act (the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981) was debated in parliament.

“To create an offence that was contrary to the express will of parliament by delegated legislation without informing anyone that it has that effect is highly unconstitutional to say the least.”

One that had previously been considered by Parliament and rejected.

And yes, this is how we are ruled now. By ignorant, vile, stupid and just plain incompetent clipboard wielders.

Hang them all I say, hang them all.

The Trust points out that the existing document emphasises economic growth as a major driver for development. Although it mentions open spaces, sport and leisure as important factors to consider there is no mention of culture or the arts.

Stanford first began complaining of “extensive retrograde amnesia” from the jailhouse attack sometime after he arrived at Butner in February, according to the prosecutors’ filing. “Stanford has recently repeatedly claimed being ‘completely amnestic to his life prior to the assault, stating that 59 years were stolen,’” Costa said in the filing, citing the Butner report.

Stanford claimed to be unable to recall life events “including his romantic encounters with various female partners, past vacation and holiday activities with his children, visits with famous politicians, as well as details of his business and banking operations,” Costa said. Stanford claimed family members had to “educate” him about his previous life, and the former billionaire “indicated feeling bad after being informed by his family that he was known as a ‘womanizer,’” Costa said, citing the Butner report.

Snigger.

In another case, Andrew Symeou was extradited to Greece in July 2009 to face charges in connection with the death of a young man on a Greek island.

He spent a year in custody before being granted bail but could not leave Greece. He was finally cleared by a Greek court in June this year.

You can get picked up and dumped in the prison of any other EU country on the basis of no evidence at all. Simply the issuance of a warrant is all that is required.

However, once you’re there, you’re a foreigner with no connections to the country, a flight risk, and thus you don’t get bail and you cannot return home while the case is processed. You know, get on with life, go to uni, whatever, while the mills of Balkan justice grind slowly.

But if you can be picked up anywhere in the EU and dumped into any prison on the basis of no evidence then you’re not in fact a flight risk, are you? If every police force in the continent can be forced to look for you, pick you up and deliver you to the court, then you are no more out of their reach pottering around Enfield productively waiting for trial than you are stuck in either a Greek prison or confined to Greece.

Indeed, the very fact that you have been picked up and delivered on an EAW shows that you absolutely are not out of the court’s jurisdiction while awaiting trial in your home country.

So not only have they got the most basic thing wrong: the EAW shouldn’t exist, no, we should not be bundling up Britons to face the courts of other countries without seeing the evidence against them, but the very fact that the EAW exists should mean instant bail and return to home while the case drags on.

And as the EU hasn’t the wit to organise this then fuck ‘em.

Can we leave yet?

But perhaps the biggest sin of the lot was effectively to render all credit default swaps (a form of insurance against default) on sovereign debt essentially worthless, or void, by making the Greek default “voluntary”.

This has made it impossible to hedge against eurozone sovereign debt purchases, and thereby destroyed the market. Worse, it’s made investors believe that the euro cannot be trusted, that it’ll repeatedly find ways of reneging on contract. That’s the point of no return. This is no longer a serious currency.

Yes, I agree, that’s about CDS contracts, not taxation or anything like that.

However, it does show what actually happens when you do what you think politically correct, what accords with your view of the spirit of the law, rather than what’s actually written down there in the law.

No one trusts you not to keep doing what you think politically desirable instead of what’s actually written down in the law.

And yes, society, the economy, our modern world, do rather depend upon trust.

The courts were flexing their political muscles again last week – as they seem to every week. First, a High Court judge ruled that Sefton Council could not legally freeze the fees it pays private companies to look after old people needing care. Then, on Friday, the same court ruled that the Isle of Wight could not cut its social care budget for the disabled.

ClientEarth, a nonprofit law firm with offices in Brussels,

Law firms are partnerships: in the technical sense there is no profit, ever. Just incomes for the partners.

Who would like to bet that as ClientEarth gets more business, the partners gain more income?

You know, like every other law firm on the planet?

Scumbag liars I call them, scumbags.

Our favourite retired accountant gave evidence for the defence yesterday and Caroline Lucas is doing so today.

So, onto something I don’t know. Is it possible to find out what evidence they gave? Trials are public so if there was a reporter in there we could of course.

But I’d be fascinated to see exactly what was asked of them and how they responded. Are such things as trial transcripts made public?

But those who wanted football to carry on here acted admirably quickly, and launched the new Chester FC as a “phoenix club”. Crucially, it’s a mutual: owned by its supporters, who can pay a minimum of £5 a season to become active shareholders. And it is not alone: the night I watched them play, their opponents in the Evo-Stik League premier division were the fan-owned FC United Of Manchester, founded in protest against the debt-laden misrule of the Glazer family. There is also AFC Wimbledon – whose fans took similar umbrage at their old club’s move to Milton Keynes and are now back in the Football League – and, among others, Brentford, Exeter City, Cambridge City, and good old Runcorn Linnets.

If that’s the way you want to organise things then you go and organise things that way. Isn’t the freedom and liberty to do your own thing a glorious possession?

As soon as it becomes law, they want government and local authorities to aggressively use the provisions of the localism bill to identify football clubs as assets of community value, thus opening the way for mutualised local ownership. More generally, they’re pushing for a sports law that will recognise that clubs amount to much more than privately owned businesses, and toughen the regulation on who can own them.

No, fuck off. The freedom and liberty for you to do your own thing necessarily means that others have the limilar liberty and freedom to do their own thing. You don’t get to use the law to confiscate the property of others.

A wife is not entitled to a £7 million share of her husband’s £24 million fortune after 25 years of marriage because he inherited it from his father, a divorce judge has ruled.

I seem to remember that Scottish divorce law has always said this, that it’s only the jointly acquired or earned dosh that gets split. Whatever was brought into the marriage stays with whoever brought it in.

Always sounded eminently sensible too.

A few years back when I mentioned this one reader wrote in to say that an awful lot of Royal Navy bods would take advantage of this. The divorce rate among submariners would peak at around and about the time of a posting to Faslane to work on the nuclear boats.

No, not because living in Scotland was such a shock that divorce was neessary but because the financial incentives to divorce while resident in Scotland were different.

The 11th Circuit decision, penned by Chief Judge Joel Dubina and Circuit Judge Frank Hull, found that “the individual mandate contained in the Act exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power.”

“What Congress cannot do under the Commerce Clause is mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die,” the opinion said.

So that’s the judges agreeing with the essentially conservative case.

Here’s the liberal side of it:

Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus said in a lengthy dissent that the majority ignored the “undeniable fact that Congress’ commerce power has grown exponentially over the past two centuries, and is now generally accepted as having afforded Congress the authority to create rules regulating large areas of our national economy.”

Now, we can be fair about this and characterise it as being one side saying the constitution is the constitution. What it says goes. Or we can take the other side, that it’s not quite a set of rules but a set of guides, guides which change over time as the society around them changes.

While they don’t use those words that is one of the major divides in constitutional law in the US.

However, we can be less fair and sum up that second argument as “heck, Congress already does lots that’s not quite constitutional under the commerce clause so why not push a bit further?”

Or to put in en clair, the constitution doesn’t stop the politicians from robbing the Republic blind, it just slows them down.

Government sources said options for change include increasing magistrates’ powers to jail offenders. Under current rules, magistrates can jail offenders for a maximum of six months. That could double to a year, sources said.

What scum they are.

If you want to take away someone’s liberty for more than 6 months then have the cojones to give them a fair trial, with a jury.

Yes, JPs are lovely, a great system, but there is a reason we have a break point, a limitation. It’s all about this freedom and liberty thing, you understand?

The more the State wants to punish you the more the State has to prove before it can punish you.

He said: “We need to do more to improve the supply side of the economy. This means taking on difficult vested interests.”

But of course it’s not just the unions and the planning system that need that reform.

The whole damn system of regulation needs to be shaken up.

Just as an example, it is illegal to manufacture apricot marmalade for sale. It’s an EU thing, quite where compotes come in preventing Germany from invading France again I’m not sure. But that is the system we’ve now got.

I’m also not quite sure where the freedom to manufacture and offer for sale apricot marmalade would come in the pecking order of things that would boost growth: not very high up I suspect.

But it is an example of the way in which the precautionary principle, allied with the continental style of civil or Roman law, has taken hold. You are deliberately prevented from doing new things because the rules say you must have permission to do new things.

Which is rather a dampner on innovation and innovation is the key to long term growth.

We need to return to an older legal structure, that of the Common Law. You may do anything that isnot illegal, not our current system of prescribing what is legal for you to produce. Yes, this does mean entirely overturning the precautionary principle.

Few to none have been charged with riot: as I’ve been saying, this might well mean that there wasn’t in fact a riot and thus the rozzers not having to pay for the damage caused in those not riots.

What slightly worries me is that Frank Dobson thinks this a possible reason for there being no charges of riot: which makes me question my own first surmise. As would agreeing with Frank Dobson on anything.

However, we seem to be getting from the government that this won’t change the situation under the Riot Damages Act.

Hmm, I dunno give the bureaucrats a loophole and they’ll drive a truck through it.

I’ve posted this before yet asinine MSM reporters continue to make statements on air such as ‘leaving businesses with a big bill’. So any journalists reading please pay close attention. Look at your insurance policy; go the exclusions and find the word that occurs between ‘radioactivity’ and ‘terrorism’. Yep. Riot. All that damage – if caused by 12 or more persons in a group acting in common purpose – is riot damage and excluded from all insurance policies. So who pays? The taxpayer does. Under the Riot and Damages Act of 1886, claims (in London) are met in the first instance by the Met police – and are then reclaimed from council tax payers by an increase in the police precept. Except Council taxes have been pegged – so now something will have to close to pay for it, like a leisure centre or a community youth project – with the site probably sold to a commercial developer. And these monkeys think they’re smart.

There’s a truth there but it’s not all of the truth.

For the riot exemption to come into play in an insurance contract the police have to charge someone with riot.

And as the police (and then the taxpayers) have to pay for the damages caused by a riot the police are very, very, wary of charging anyone with riot.

I’m told that, although have not checked or even know where to check, that during the poll tax riots no one was actually charged with riot.

Incentives do matter you know…..

But this argument ends up in stupidity:

It is a similar picture for cop killers, the public understands that the police put themselves in harm’s way on their behalf every day. If a criminal in the course of committing a crime kills a police officer it is invariably deliberate. Having the death penalty for cop killers will make criminals fear the consequences and give extra legislative protection to the police beyond a stab vest. Once again the public shows a two-thirds majority in favour of the death penalty for cop killers. Not because their lives are worth more than ours, it is because the police daily risk their lives to protect our lives.

Sigh, Recall what happened when we did have the death penalty for those who killed police officers.

If a police officer was killed then someone had to swing for it.

Derek William Bentley (30 June 1933 – 28 January 1953) was a British teenager hanged for the murder of a police officer, committed in the course of a burglary attempt. The murder of the police officer was committed by a friend and accomplice of Bentley’s, Christopher Craig, then aged 16. Bentley was convicted as a party to the murder, by the English law principle of “joint enterprise“. This created a cause célèbre and led to a 45-year-long campaign to win Derek Bentley a posthumous pardon, which was granted partially in 1993, then completely in 1998.

The execution is within living memory and even Guido’s second Summer of Love haze had cleared by the time of the pardon.

Arguing that cop killers should hang when hanging cop killers is exactly and precisely the reason that we know that we hung the wrong person is, well, it climbs the very bounds of stupidity really.