Ministers are to announce plans to allow magistrates to sit on their own in community centres or police stations in a bid to speed up justice.

They’ve just spent a decade or more closing down local Magistrate’s Courts and organising them into more “efficient” regional ones.

And this?

Sittings would take place in varied locations including community centres and police stations as well as via live video link to cells.

No fucking way. Even for a guilty plea on a trivial offence everybody, but everybody, gets their moment in an open court. Summat to do with this Habeas Corpus thing, no?

How long would it be before commital proceedings were done by video link? Before bail decisions?

Just no.

And perhaps dragging the physical body into court makes the courts system more expensive. But that’s just absolutely fine for the administration of justice is what the State’s fucking for. It’s vastly more important than quashing inequality, fighting misogyny or proividing duck houses for our rulers. This is the whole damn point of having a State and a taxation system, so that we can indeed have that public good of the tolerable administration of justice.

The Roberts court redefines judicial activism: it is pursuing a states’ rights, anti-federal agenda, reckless of the constitution

That’s the subs getting it wrong of course.

A State’s rights agenda is a pro-federal agenda.

For that’s what federal means, that there are multiple sovereignties and a division of powers between them.

The opposite to State’s rights is not federal, it is unitary state.

As to the actual piece by Scott Lemiuex, it’s basically, sure, I like the Constitution too but not when it stops some project that I’m in favour of.

Which rather misses the point of having a constitution, which is a set of rules that all must obey. Yes, your friends as well as your enemies.

Mr Justice Mitting indicated that he would reconsider the preacher’s detention if his deportation was “not imminent”.

Yesterday Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was faced with mounting evidence that her officials had made an error over a deadline for Qatada, whose real name is Omar Othman, to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which may have allowed him to prolong his stay in Britain for up to a year.

Any prospect of a lengthy legal process would greatly increase the chances of the cleric once described as Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe being granted bail, the judge suggested.

Mrs May insists she was free to arrest Qatada and restart deportation proceedings on Tuesday because a deadline to appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg court passed at midnight on Monday.

But Qatada’s lawyers argue that the deadline was 24 hours later, and submitted a last-ditch appeal on Tuesday night.

Legal experts and officials yesterday suggested that Home Office officials were wrong and that Qatada made his appeal within the correct time frame. This could mean that the Home Secretary acted illegally by restarting deportation proceedings prematurely.

So, I’m glad I was able to get my insult about the Home Sec in while she was still Home Se. Only just managed it though:

Note that we can’t have anything else as well as that half of the government that we’re going to be so lucky to get. We don’t get any clothes, food, telephone calls or holidays, we just get whichever one of Ken Clarke or Theresa May that we’d prefer. No, you can’t even have the pint that might be enjoyable to have with Ken nor the pint I’d certainly need to spend time with Theresa.

A 16th century masterpiece has been returned to the heirs of a Jewish man, 70 years after being wrested away during World War II.

They knew the painting was in an Itlaian government run museum, they were trying to get it back. No dice, no one would take any notice. The museum lent it to a museum in the US and the US authorities seized it, ran through the ownership disputes and returned it to the heirs.

There’s an important underlying point here. There are parts of Europe that are a great deal less active (to put it mildly) in returning those assets seized from Jews and others in WWII that might be just or righteous. It isn’t just Swiss banks demanding death certificates for those that died in the gas chambers.

The Austrians, for example, returned one painting to a family and then charged them $8,000 storage fees. For something that had been illegally confiscated from a murdered forebear in the first place.

It’s all still a blot on the landscape….a moral stain.

Renounce European Court, Britain urged
Britain should turn its back on the European Court of Human Rights because its rulings on the extradition of terrorist suspects risk undermining the special relationship, a former US ambassador said.

For I do think we should withdraw from the Council of Europe (seriously, who thinks it is a good idea to have Russian and Belorussian judges ruling upon our human rights?) and thus the ECHR.

However, I don’t think that handing people over to the US Govt is a good reason to do that.

For a start, we Brits should have exactly the same protections against extradition to the US that US citizens have against extradition to the UK. You know, this stuff about presentation of evidence, proof of a prima facie case etc which currently does not need to happen.

And I certainly don’t think that people should be bundled upon a plane because a Bush Era mustache thinks that they bad ‘uns because they’re Muslim radicals.

The place doesn’t have a good record on fair trials of such at present, does it?

Actually, to be honest, it’s probably a good idea that I’m not a politician with responsibility for such things. For I’d sit down and talk to my oppo thusly:

“We do not deliver British citizens to jursidictions where they will not receive a fair trial. Once you try the lot you’ve already got in the open, under the same laws and rules that apply to everyone else in the US, then we’ll talk about the new ones you want. Until then the “land of the free” can fuck off matey”.

That would probably have the US Marines storming the beaches at Hove but what the hell, liberty and freedom are worth Hove aren’t they?

Or as it turns out, not a dilemma for a UKIPPER at all. We Brits have rights because we are Brits and it is our government’s duty to protect those rights from all comers, whichever flavour of Johnny Foreigner they may be.

In Britain, even the most minor convictions for student pranks or breaches of the peace can come back to haunt jobseekers years later if they apply for positions as teachers, policemen or other “sensitive” roles.

And I’m even more worried than Nick Drew about this.

Because contracts are inviolable peepsw are asking, and some have got, that tax regimes etc should be contractual, not just legislative. For future governments can always change the law but those contracts will still stand.

Which sounds like a good idea: but here’s the worry. The incentives and pressures for politicians to change the law are well known. But those same incentives are likley to have them making the contracts that previous governments have entered into violable.

And that’s a whole shitload more of a problem, that undermining of why English commercial law actually works as well as it does.

In essence, I’m suggesting that the incentives politicians have to lie, cheat and steal would be such that they would break the law of contract if they were held to it. So don’t hold them to it, for that law of contract is too important to be broken by the flapheads and gumjabberers.

There are situations that come along where the law proves itself to be wholly perverse. This is clearly one of them.

If the courts are not willing or able to take a stand, Parliament needs to immediately intervene with laws that apply retrospectively so as to clear this woman’s criminal record.

Dear God no.

For if they can change the law to make us not guilty retrospectively then they can change the laws to make us guilty retrospectively.

And a much better piece on the case is here. A Royal Pardon might well be the solution.

Here’s how I like my law: sharp, clear and tightly worded, so that everyone – even those with soup for brains and the morals of an alley cat – knows when it is being broken. For an example of how not to do law, however, we must look to the Council of Europe’s convention on violence against women,

Quite. If there is to be a law we must, all of us, be able to understand it.

Mentioning Ulster has brought to mind a religious analogy. The Catholic Church operated for centuries on the idea that the proles shouldn’t worry themselves over much. Allow the, quite literally, priestly caste to worry about the details and those proles should just do what they are told by those in the know “interpreting” matters.

The Protestant revolution was, in part (it never does to strain these analogy/simile things too much) that the Bible, when in the vernacular, as clear an outline of God’s will as any should need. Intervention was not needed, a man could commune directly with the Word and the Will of God.

On the matter of the law I am a Protestant. As rigid and unyielding as any Puritan, Lutheran or Calvinist. With a twist of course: the law must be written so that it can be understood directly, without that intervention of the priestly caste of lawyers, accountants, diversity advisors or bureaucrat’s helplines.

If you cannot write a law with the clarity of “thou shalt not kill” then go away and think through what it is that you’re trying to enact, the language that you are using to do so until you can, with clarity, tell us what it is that we must not do at fear of time in pokey.

That modern society is complex is no excuse. If you cannot write simple and simply understood laws then better that we have fewer laws.

That the Puritans went gargantuanly off the rails by using their new found revelations of God’s Will to tell everyone else what to do is true. But I do find it interesting that our new would be ruling class, the nomenklatura, are adopting such a Catholic view of the law. We’ll make it all so complex that no individual can understand it and thus there is the necessity of that nomenklatura to tell people what to do in detail by “interpreting” it.

“These figures are a shocking reminder of the divide between the housing haves and have nots in this country,” Campbell Robb, the chief executive of Shelter, said.

“Amid growing economic gloom and rising unemployment, increasing numbers of ordinary families are falling victim to our housing crisis. Some may be priced out of the housing market, forced to bring up their families in a revolving door of private let after private let.”

Fancy that, people having to renew a contractual relationship?

The first thing we do, let’s kill all lawyers”, says a Jack Cade rebel in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2. It always gets a laugh and a whoop or two. Kenneth Clarke, secretary of state for justice, knows his audience too: few hearts bleed at cutting lawyers’ fees. Naturally he blurs the difference between fat cat barristers earning fortunes from legal aid in high-profile criminal cases, whose fees he leaves untouched – and the work of social conscience lawyers, whose fees he is abolishing completely. Public interest lawyers earn very little in law centres and Citizens Advice bureaus, helping people lost in the legal wilderness of welfare, tenancies or working rights. As a result, law centres and CABs will close.

I happen to think that law centres and CABs are a very good thing. But I can still see a clear difference between the two sorts of support for access to the law.

In the one case the State is collating its monstrous power to deprive you of your freedom and liberty. In the other help is required in navigating the monstrous bureaucracy of the Big State. As I say, I can see that the latter is both just and desirable: but it really just isn’t the same as the former and I’m not at all surprised, indeed welcome, that the distinction is being made.

It is more important that those accused be able to defend themselves than that those mystified be informed.

Christopher Tappin, the British pensioner extradited to the US on charges of conspiring to supply weapons parts to Iran, has been denied bail by a Texan court.

For, by definition, if you’ve been extradited then you’ve had to be dragged into the jurisdiction of the court. So, obviously, you’re more of a flight risk than someone who has not had to be dragged into the jurisdiction. And flight risk is the major point upon which the granting of bail or not depends.

There’s not really a solution to this problem either…..

Lynne Featherstone directly challenges the role of the Church in the debate over homosexual weddings, saying it does not “own” marriage.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Miss Featherstone says the Government has a right to change the definition of marriage and pledges to challenge those who “want to leave tradition alone”.

Citing the words of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who is a prominent opponent of the Coalition’s plans to allow same-sex couples to marry, she insists that how marriage is defined is up to “the people”.

Not sure about the people but certainly the government. We settled this (or, perhaps, had it settled for us) in 1534.

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.