Justice: blind or stupid?
Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 04:16PM For the second time Graham Coutts has been convicted of murdering Jane Longhurst. I won't go through the horrific details, which you can read elsewhere, suffice it to say hanging is too good for him. The question is why was a second trial necessary?
The answer is that, even in a case so cut and dried as this, lawyers and judges like to fret and fuss over the absence of a comma somewhere in the paperwork. More specifically, the Law Lords quashed the conviction because the original jury hadn't been given the option of manslaughter (a decision the defence was happy with.)
If I'm honest, I can understand the reason for quashing the conviction, but seeing as he has again been found guilty of murder, what exactly was the point of dragging the victim's family through a second trial for this man, who's actions following the death were despicable enough to warrant a rope round his neck? As always, the only people who gain are the lawyers, or as Gerard Winstanley would have said, the parasites.
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Reader Comments (3)
Good post. Why do you think you can understand the queashing bit, out of curiosity?
The argument was that a rational jury could have thought him guilty of manslaughter, and then given a guilty of murder verdict, even though they didn't think he was, because the alternative would have been to let him walk free, which kind of makes sense, but seeing as the second jury found him guilty of murder, I thik we can conclude the judges and lawyers have been wasting everyone's time.
Good Lord, he's a sick bastard - hang him!
Our system is bad, yours seems to be really, really bad.