A CLASS DRUGS POSSESSION DECRIMINALISED IN SCOTLAND

This blog has consistently argued for the decriminalisation of drugs in England.  The current system has failed miserably to stop, control or persuade  drug users, occasional or habitual, to give up their habit or addiction.  Drug use has been estimated to account for c 70% of acquisitive and/or violent crime.  So called county lines drug supply routes were unknown a decade ago but  as night follows day they developed a few years subsequent to their establishment in most USA urban areas.  Centuries prior to the ravings of the Scottish National Party Scotland was justly proud of its independent legal and educational systems. The quality and attainments of the latter under the SNP have not been matters of pride but so far the legal system has withstood the porridge brains of those who inhabit   Pàrlamaid na h-Alba otherwise known colloquially as "Holyrood".  

Witness corroboration is required in Scots law as the evidence of one witness, however credible, is not sufficient to prove a charge against an accused or to establish any material or crucial fact. A common form of corroboration in regards to criminal offences is there are two or more witnesses to an offence.  In all probability this has allowed the wrongful criminal conviction rate to be far below that in England and Wales but apparently there are no official statistics I could find to substantiate that opinion.  I quote from Wikipedia; " As at 31 March 2007 [my bold]  the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had received a total of 887 cases since April 1999, when it was established. The Commission completed its review of 841 of these cases and referred 67 of them to the High Court. Of the referrals, 39 have been determined: 25 appeals were granted; 11 appeals rejected; and, 3 abandoned. Chief Executive, Gerard Sinclair, says that normally the court rules about half the referrals to be a miscarriage of justice each year, which would equate in 2003 to roughly 0.005% of the total number of Scottish criminal convictions. But, says Sinclair: "Even if it were just one wrongful conviction a year, that would still be one too many."  The secrecy behind the apparent publication of current statistics is at odds with the welcome live televising of some major Scottish trials.  Combined with the "third verdict", in many ways the legal system north of the border is far in advance of many other jurisdictions in protecting the rights of the individual citizen.  

And so to possession of class A prohibited drugs. Last week it was announced that those in possession of class A  drugs would not be prosecuted if it could be demonstrated that the user had no intention to supply. Effectively possession of drugs for personal use has been decriminalised.  The extraordinary death rate from drug use in Scotland has driven this innovative change of policy. In 2020 1,339 people died as a direct result of drug use. In England and Wales with over ten times the population the number who died from drug use was 4,561.  One doesn`t have to be a statistician to note the scale of the problem in Scotland. In Glasgow last year the death rate was 30 per 100,000 people.  It is not unlikely that that rate will be exceeded this year.  This change in outcomes follows from the declining proportion of drug users in recent years being prosecuted in court.  There is a caveat to my welcoming this momentous change in process: without any provision so far published to rehabilitate and wean addicts as opposed to "recreational  middle class users" off heroin and cocaine a chance is being missed to drastically remove the problem from the largely marginalised youth of deprived neighbourhoods.  I have argued in previous posts for the establishment of compulsorily attendance in medically run institutions devoted solely to that cause........the rehabilitation of drug addicts.  Under the newly established attitudes to such a major problem for society in general and countless families in particular this would seem an opportune moment for the Scottish government to take one more step and find the cash and motivation to wipe off the blot of having Europe`s worst rate of drug addiction.  

ARE GUIDELINES ACTUALLY REQUIRED FOR "EXCEPTIONAL HARDSHIP"?

I have posted here more times than I care to remember on the topic of exceptional hardship.  They can be accessed by putting those words in the search box.  I have also posted not infrequently that the sentencing abilities of a magistrates bench have been greatly restricted by the ever increasing "guidelines" from the Sentencing Council. There must now be thousands of magistrates who have no experience of a bench under an experienced chairman following a well developed sentencing structure in which, sometimes under the guidance of a legal advisor and sometimes not, a sensible ladder of various and varying possibilities played out. The current system will, if not now, in time lead to a tick box system in which an algorithm will issue a sentence and the bench will be tasked with deciding if any amendments are needed for any individual case.  Exceptional hardship is one of the diminishing number of issues for which no guidelines currently exist although my understanding is that that exception is currently under review.  A recent simple report makes the problem clear.  The very essence of the totting procedure is that every driver should be aware that 12 penalty points within three years equals disqualification.  For many high street law firms exceptional hardship is a very nice money tree.  In my early days on the bench as a newbie winger my protestations against my senior colleagues` decisions to allow the exceptional hardship defence in the flimsiest of arguments went unheard.  As a chairman having done some individual research as was available on the subject I would steer my colleagues along strictly rational grounds sometimes in conflict with an overbearing intrusive legal advisor voicing her concerns which we took on board and rejected. Latest  figures from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) show that nearly 9,000 drivers still hold a licence despite exceeding the 12-point threshold.  Why should anyone with customers/ clients/ patients dependent upon their advice/opinion/labour be treated more favourably?  Where is a line to be drawn?  From my experience colleagues wanted to accept arguments from  middle class professionals much more often than from those of a lower social status. I firmly then as  now reject this view. The doctor in the case above was well aware of the consequences of her actions.  Indeed it might be argued that she would (should)  have been more aware than most of the consequences.  Indeed her culpability IMHO was increased by her social and professional position. An interesting argument which should be mandatory reading for all magistrates was heard at the  APPEAL COURT, HIGH COURT OF JUSTICIARY in Scotland 2012.  As is often the case appellants with adequate financial resources have the wherewithal to challenge a ban resulting from losing an exceptional hardship argument.  Perhaps this is actually an area where magistrates need to be subject to guidelines so that their oath might be realised in actuality as opposed to theory. 

 “I, ____________ , do solemnly sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth the Second in the office of ____________ , and I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this Realm without fear or favour, affection or ill will.”

PLUS CA CHANGE ...................

We now have the 8th Lord Chancellor/ Justice Secretary since 2010. It doesn`t need advanced mathematics to appreciate that at that rate it is impossible for anyone however gifted to truly appreciate all the nuances of the job and to set the direction of travel without the combined resources of those who keep the wheels turning ie the department`s civil servants.  But the great British public really doesn`t care about "justice" until perhaps the summons appears in their letter box.  Al they know is the few brief lines in their local paper or what they read or hear on social media:- Twitter Law. With in depth reporting of criminal matters becoming more sparse week by week, headline criminality excepted, it is cases like this which form the concept of "justice" in the public mind.  Compared to many that report seems comprehensive but it leaves the impression of "soft" justice: perhaps that is justified.  There is nothing reported by the presiding magistrate which seems to justify the leniency dished out to this offender.  Taking this a step further it is this mindset which has increasingly driven sentencing to the highest levels of severity in a generation at a time when prison conditions are fast approaching a national disgrace, probation services have yet to recover from their decimation by the most incompetent of the previous seven Lord Chancellors  and increasing emphasis on so called victim-hood. The new boy at Petty France will, no doubt as all his predecessors have done, in due course issue a long statement of how knife crime will be a priority and criminals will receive their just deserts but all I can add is plus ça change plus c'est la meme chose.

A PAT ON THE BACK

For the first time since my retirement I attended a magistrates court not long ago. In the past I have described,  as an insider, some of the shortcomings of my own court and the system in general.  Indeed much frustration has been ventilated here but the 10.00 a.m. start of that recent session demonstrated to me at least a facet of English justice of which I felt justly proud to have been a very very small part. Whether that experience was typical is another matter. 

In the witness box: a Spanish interpreter sworn in; at hand a young woman recently arrived from South America was to make a statutory declaration. She had recently received a notice from a firm of bailiffs demanding around £600 in fine plus costs for non payment of a fine for a motoring offence. Her declaration stated that for various reasons she had received no earlier notification that any offence had been committed, no demand for payment and queried the offence details themselves.

The procedure was carefully explained and translated for her and she left the courtroom with a perfect understanding of what might follow. I thought to myself what other country would provide such a service at no cost to a short term visitor with only her native language available for all but the most basic topics. 

ETHNIC PAKISTANI MURDER RATES BELOW THE HORIZON

 

A decade ago most people would have been hard put to offer a meaning to the term "woke".  They had gotten used to the term "politically correct" but there was another expression which had yet to appear amongst the deluge of print in broadsheets and others; "cancel culture".  The term "racist" had become common parlance decades ago.  Until perhaps thirty years ago it was used in its basic form as an adjective  to describe being prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalised.  As a noun it identified being a racist as a person who is prejudiced against or antagonistic towards people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalised. How times have moved on. Whilst the "N" word is virtually forbidden and rightly erased in almost any context there are still epithets in common parlance used to denigrate Jewish people; Jew boy and Yid can still be heard whilst Zionist has been robbed of its true meaning to castigate Jews (Israel) for the situation of  those in Judea and Samaria who term themselves Palestinians.  It is ironic that there have been historic periods when the Jews of mandatory Palestine and earlier were themselves termed Palestinians.  Currently the term Paki has been become an overall term of derision for those originating from the sub continent. The users appear to be indifferent to or unaware of the dozens of ethnic minorities from Iran to Afghanistan and including Pakistan  many of whom wear a head covering or clothes of their ethnic backgrounds. However there is no doubt that many of those of Pakistani descent in England  are from families who originally inhabited outlying rural areas where Sharia was predominant as opposed to the more cosmopolitan people of the cities eg Karachi and Islamabad.  Many of those families settled in the north of England. For the last twenty years many organisations including police and politicians have gone overboard to explain the criminal actions of Pakistani men, often now 2nd or 3rd generation in this country as somehow not being associated with their ethnic status. They felt the risk of being called racist was more than they or those for whom they had responsibility could bear. And so the scandals of abused white girls by Pakistani men went underground and denied by the "great and the good" until pressure was so overwhelming that the roof was raised at the extent of what was effectively a cover up of the real facts.  The racist abuse of the accusers was quietened for a while. 

That now brings this post up to date. The UK has a population of 62 million.  Those identifying as Pakistani number 208,000: i.e. 0.34% of the population.  The table below shows that of 265 convictions of murder in 2020 seven of the offenders were of Pakistani ethnicity. To put that in context those seven represented 2.64% of the total number of convicted murderers. In other words that ethnic minority`s murder rate was 776% in excess of its numbers in the population.  These are government statistics; facts and facts alone. I believe there are vested interests in keeping those facts, shall we say, below the horizon and generally out of sight.