Daily Diversions (Web Log)

David’s Mental Meanderings
19 July 2002

In an effort to attack the increase in crime, and particularly violent crime, the British Government have decided to reform the criminal justice system. They have produced a 186-page document outlining the changes they intend to introduce. Since you don’t want to be reading 186 pages, I’ll outline a few of the more interesting points to shock and amuse.

Too many criminals seem to be going free because the police aren’t gathering enough evidence to convict them. An easy remedy has been found. We’ll just eliminate the principle of double jeopardy.

Because this is enshrined in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, you may be surprised to know that it is originally a principle in English law going back 800 years. However, without a written constitution there is no inconvenient and elongated process in removing this axiom of English legal system. All you need is a comfortable majority in one house of the legislature and poof! Gone.

The elimination of the double jeopardy prohibition is being applied retroactively. There’s no rule against passing ex post facto laws here. Anyone up to this point who has ever been acquitted of a crime will now have to keep looking over their shoulder.

Unfortunately, the policy of trying a defendant over and over until a conviction is secured only exacerbates another problem area of the justice system – a severe backlog of cases due to the number crimes prosecuted. But not to worry, Tony Blair and his friends have thought of that. The quickest way to move cases through the courts is to remove the unnecessary time consumed by jury trials. And after all, the trial by jury has its origins in the medieval period. Anything that old needs to be thrown out anyway. And that way, if the Crown needs to charge you over and over with the same offence, at least they don’t have keep convincing twelve laymen of their case.

Some of the additional reforms haven’t gotten much press. One of these is indeterminate sentencing. Some crimes will now not carry a fixed sentence, but rather the person convicted will just be held at Her Majesty’s Pleasure until someone decides they’ve had enough.

Even less has been said about the overhaul of the Rules of Evidence. A non-lawyer might think this is a matter of small unimportant details and useless legal jargon. Not so. The principles which determine what types of evidence can be presented and how it is to be presented have been developed and honed over centuries to give us (those in the English common law tradition on both sides of the Atlantic), like it or not, the most fair way of determining guilt or innocence.

This Government has explicitly said that the purpose of this overhaul is “so that the widest possible range of material, including relevant previous convictions, is available to the court.”

I’m sure that many times you’ve seen reports of a high-profile case in which you were sure that if the jury knew about the defendant’s previous convictions, surely they would convict him now. That’s exactly what the rules prohibit, because it isn’t relevant as to whether or not this bad person committed that particular offence. It’s prejudicial. However, it is often the reason police make arrests – the defendant is known to them and is the most convenient bad guy they can find. How much more will this open the door to unscrupulous law enforcement?

The Government also intend to do away with the hearsay rule, give the prosecution the right to appeal, and a few other things to ensure that more convictions are had.

But enough about crime. The other major issue the Government are always addressing is health care.

The hot topic in the local newspaper is the use of mixed-sex wards in the County Hospital. (You may remember from our previous instalment that I was a guest there only a few weeks ago.) The Government had set a target of eliminating mixed wards throughout the country by 2003, but has now said it will not be able to meet that target.

The amazing thing to me is not that the Government is not able to eliminate these wards, but that they ever existed in the first place. Who came up with the idea of free-at-the-point-of-service, state-funded health care, with the little caveat that if you do end up in the hospital, you should be prepared walk around in an open-backed gown and have intimate procedures performed in the presence of the opposite sex? The local paper has been flooded with letters from patients and relatives of patients who have suffered through unnecessary embarrassments and indignities.

For any of you who haven’t ventured outside the US, you might be surprised that the ward system still exists other than in news clips from third-world countries and M*A*S*H reruns. This is a country that with socialized medicine invests half of the percentage of the national budget into medicine compared to the United States.

When I spent my time in the County Hospital, it was only by Providence that I ended up in a private room. Every other bed in the place was taken. Had a different bed become available, I would have been surrounded by half a dozen little old ladies.

So if the National Health Service is not spending its money on patient care, just what is it spending money on?

Last year it came out that gay men were being treated to a luxury weekend in nearby Malvern to help them come to terms with their sexuality - courtesy of the NHS. Fifteen homosexuals stayed free of charge at Runnings Park, a rural retreat set in 17 acres of rolling parkland, boasting an indoor swimming pool, luxury sauna and award-winning restaurant as part of its "healing and development" courses. The “treatments” available included flotation, holistic massage and aromatherapy. There were also workshops on coming out, homophobia and safe sex. The cost for each man was around $375 for a two-night stay.

Thanks to a ruling by the Court of Appeals in 1999, the NHS also pays for those unfortunate people who find that God made a mistake and assigned them to the wrong half of the human race. This “gender reassignment” surgery costs about $12,000.

At least the cash-strapped NHS doesn’t have to pay for sex change operations for soldiers. That cost is borne by the Ministry of Defence. In the dark ages of Conservative rule, soldiers who went through the doors of the operating theatre were also shown the door out of the service.

Now they are no longer forced to leave the army when they want to change sex. Since new guidelines were introduced in 2000, they are assessed by psychologists and are allowed to continue to serve if they are deemed able to -- although they may have to be moved to a less physically demanding job. And I assume they have already been given a set of attractive new uniforms, because as an MoD spokeswoman (well, we assume it was actually a woman) stated: "People need to live as the gender they want to be for about a year before they can have the operation - and we have provided the drugs and other support."

The MoD also pays for breast enlargements. We are assured that this is only when there is a “clinical need”, because military hospitals do not provide “wholly cosmetic” surgery. I’m not sure when a clinical need for breast enlargement arises, but I’m even further baffled as to why this need is particularly prevalent amongst military personnel.

To wind up, let’s return to the law. Not satisfied with having surgery paid for by the NHS, transsexuals last week convinced the European Court of Human Rights (under which jurisdiction the UK submitted itself a couple of years ago) that as a part of their right to privacy, they are entitled to have their birth certificate changed.

It’s not enough that they could already change their driver’s license, National Insurance (thus receiving their state pension five years earlier), and passport. They actually want to re-write history. A birth certificate documents that on a certain day and in a certain place, a particular event occurred, namely the birth of a male or female child, who, despite a future choice of genital mutilation, will always have either XX or XY chromosomes.

However, their right for no one to ever know that they were born as something other than they purport to be, or appear to be thanks to surgery and artificially introduced hormones, supersedes all else. In effect, they are legally created anew. I’ll leave you to ponder the implications. What happens to any criminal record? Are all debts no longer collectable against a person who no longer exists? Is this a way to get out of students loans?

Those are a few of the things going on in the UK this week.