Crime and consequences

Contempt of court

lain Scarlet

Like most of my generation I was brought up to believe in God, the monarchy and the excellence of English justice. I'm lucky enough to retain two of those beliefs but few of us, I suspect, can any longer take for granted the quality of the criminal justice nowadays being dispensed before God and on behalf of our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth II.

Indeed, I suspect that many people feel the courts are teetering on the brink of falling into public contempt. This is not simply because they have signally failed to maintain any respect for what the Politicians and police call Law and Order. Nor on the other hand because of the occasional outrage Perpetrated by an individual judge or magistrate.

Nor is it because of the gaudy garb, the antediluvian phraseology and the dog-latin shorthand which lawyers use to provide themselves With a separatist but otherwise quite meaningless mystique. Nor even because of the closed-shop arrogance so splendidly recognised and delightfully understated by that ubiquitous 'junior' lawyer, Lord Goodman, when he said ". . . lawyers and judges ... assume that the rest of the world has a reverence for them which it does not have."

No, although all these things must be considered in any judgement of the courts, there are other, more fundamental reasons why they Presently tail to merit much public confidence. And the most basic of these, I submit, lies in the lawyers' reverential attitude to the law. They have forgotten that law is a social science; and that social sciences have to justify their existence by progressively adapting their discipline to the mores of an ever-changing society.

This the lawyers have consistently failed to do. Where other social scientists have done their damnedest to move with — and occasionally be a jump ahead of — the times, they have allowed the law in its application to stultify. Where others have gone out into the real world looking for the essential 'feedback' upon which to nourish their discipline, they have locked themselves in their cloistered Inns of Court and fed off the great god Precedent.

And this in turn, I further submit, is because since the war they have allowed themselves to be led by men who were either ill-fitted to lead in the first place, or too unimaginative and too uninspiring to lead successfully any group more demanding than a bunch of giggling girl guides on a Hampton Court outing.

In other words, the buck stops with the bosses. And despite the fact that the 'bosses' concerned are the holders of that ancient and honourable office, Lord Chief Justice of England, it is by examining their individual track records that we can best see why courts throughout the land are no longer held in such high public esteem.

We've had three LCJs since the war and the first of them was the legendary Lord Goddard. Rayner Goddard was appointed in 1946. He lasted for twelve years, until he was 81, and it is now generally conceded by all but the more paranoid denizens of the four Inns that his tenure of office was an unmitigated calamity. How he came to be appointed is anybody's guess. But anyone who'd cared to cast even a cursory glance over his antecedents (as he himself was all too often inclined to cast only a cursory glance over defendants' antecedents before passing sentence) must have realised that the man was so emotionally retarded as to be totally unfitted to pass judgement on anything at all, let alone a human being.

For one of the many things Goddard. lacked was genuine humanity. From his schooldays he had displayed an unhealthily macabre turn of mind: when asked at Marlborough to recite his favourite piece of prose he had chosen to intone the death penalty. He had absolutely no sense of humour and certainly couldn't take a joke against himself: as a young barrister trying to impress a colleague he had led the way into his bank and airily demanded to cash a cheque, only to be met by the cashier saying, "Of course, sir. Would Sir like silver or a tenshilling note?" He had exploded on the spot and years later, when jokingly reminded of the incident by his colleague, by then himself a High Court judge, he had exploded again.

Worse in a man destined for the Bench, he was a hypocrite and a drunk, hooked on hanging, flogging and the recitation of filthy dirty stories. When a Conservative MP had become involved in a divorce (of which the puritanical Goddard violently disapproved), he had threatened — and indeed prepared — to stand against him as a Conservative Purity candidate; yet about the same time he was seen

about South Kensington cocktail parties getting drunker and drunker and mauling — no, not patting, mauling — pretty girls' posteriors.

And when as LCJ he visited Oxford he peremptorily summoned all the law dons to a lecture he proposed to deliver at the inconvenient hour of 10 p.m., then turned up boozed to the eyeballs and proceeded to regale his audience with anecdotes so nauseous that many, to their credit, walked out on him.

On the Bench his behaviour was frequently outrageous and often obscene. His conduct of the Laski libel case is generally admitted even by lawyers to have been disgraceful; his behaviour during the trial of Craig and Bentley (when he interrupted the proceedings 200 times in two days and spent much of the time brandishing a knuckleduster to boot) was not that of a judge but a bigoted old bore. His favourite story concerned the time when just as he'd finished sentencing three men to be hanged by the neck, a barrel-organ had started to play the Eton Boating Song: "We'll all swing together ..."

And this was the man who led the English judiciary into the latter half of the twentieth century, the man who became a legend in his own lifetime. Unfortunately it is not to the credit of his fellow lawyers that, far from recognising the damage he'd done, when he retired they actually regretted his going.

Nor is it to their credit that even while in open court they were effusively welcoming his successor, Lord Parker, they were privately bemoaning the fact that Parker was not "half the man Goddarct was."

In fact, Parker was a much nicer man than his predecessor, a harder worker, a better lawyer and a much more sensitive human being. Unfortunately he was also unimaginative; and where Goddard had been downright dangerous, he was only uninspiring.

One of his first acts was to insist on some measure of training for judges. This pleased everybody except the judges themselves — who presumably thought they knew it all anyway — so the original intention had to be modified. The result was that instead of discussing the philosophy of sentencing itself, they simply got together a few at a time and did 'exercises' designed to ensure greater consistency of sentence.

This was Parker's first missed opportunity. During the next few years he was to miss many more but undoubtedly the most serious of these came with his decision to ignore the 'Ormrod Report' on legal education.

In his report Justice Ormrod opined that lawyers were being trained on far too narrow a front and suggested ways and means by which their horizons might be broadened. He also reminded his brothers that they were not referred to as 'learned' simply because they were 'learned in the law' but because they were also supposed to have a good working knowledge of the other social sciences of the day. And this, he suggested in 1968, too many of them simply didn't have.

It made uncomfortable reading for all to whom it might . have applied and Parker, by then himself sixty-eight and looking forward to retirement, couldn't cope. The Report was quite quietly buried and forgotten.

But there was something else about Parker which also deserves mention: his innocence. His whole career as a judge had been served under 'Chief' Goddard and he remained under that man's spell. Thus when he was faced with a rapidly increasing crime rate he could think only of a simplistic, Goddard-type solution/ the same medicine as before but in larger doses.

Predictably it didn't work. But by the time Parker realised it wasn't working he was already hooked on the 'exemplary' (a legal euphemism for 'long') sentence. Equally predictably this sentencing policy began to boomerang in more ways than one. Criminals who had previously regarded reasonable terms of imprisonment as an occupational hazard, and arrest certainly not to be resisted by force, suddenly began to realise that the hazards were rapidly becoming, in their view, unreasonable. So they began to take what they thought were the appropriate steps: they took to carrying weapons, initially for the purpose of resisting arrest, later to assist them in carrying out their crimes. In the early 'sixties a new word entered into underworld jargon: a Parker '61 was a sawn-off shotgun.

But the long-sentence policy had another boomerang-effect too. Prisoners sent down for what they regarded as viciously long terms began to think more and more of escape as their only recourse; and in their attempts they were ably abetted by their fellow inmates.

The classic example of this concerned George Blake. Now prisoners generally are not keen either on sexual offenders or trai tors and such people are apt to have a hard time serving their sentences. But prisoners are also inclined to sympathise with any offender whom they regard as having had a raw deal at the hands of the courts. Thus when Parker himself sentenced Blake to three terms of 14 years apiece, to run consecutively, they instantly changed their mind about the traitor and took him to their hearts. Forty-two years was then a record sentence and few people can have been more delighted than the inmates of Wormwood Scrubs when George Blake opted out of serving it by going over the wall.

Indeed, the news of his departure was warmly welcomed in most of HM Prisons and many others emulated his example. There was a great eczema of escapes in the following weeks and it was the courts as much as the prison authorities which were brought into disrepute. Much of the blame must lie with Lord Parker.

As his successor came the present incumbent, Lord Widgery. On appointment he was greeted as being ''a chip off the old bench" and that just about sums him up. Almost as soon as he'd been effusively welcomed to office by brothers in law (they're an incestuous bunch, lawyers: there's nothing they like more than to make much of one another in open court), Lord Widgery applied himself to the matter of the Judges' Rules.

These rules have for ages past protected the interests of a 'suspected person, ensured that he need not answer questions without first consulting his solicitor, and given him the ultimate refuge of remaining silent. Lord Widgery appears to have taken the view of so many in the police and legal profession that too many guilty people were 'getting off' that suspects should be denied the right to the presence of a solicitor, and that a suspect's silence could war

rant adverse comment in court.

This was his first failure. And he was beaten by public opinion, for the ordinary Englishman in the street still prefers that ninety-nine guilty men should go free rather than one innocent should be punished.

His second failure came at the hands of the Welsh. Shortly after taking office he decided to show the flag in Wales and a great public relations exercise was laid on. The greatest beneficiary of all this was a five-year-old boy, one Robert Jones. Robert was the son of the local constable at Radyr, near Cardiff, and it was his habit to dress up as a policeman, arrest his younger sister and imprison her in the pantry, then go out and salute the judge's car as it passed on its way to court.

One morning Lord Widgery stopped his car, got out and presented young Robert with his sergeant's stripes, and announced for all to hear that he was proud of him. It was a good human interest story and it got good press coverage. Unfortunately it didn't impress the Welsh very much. As a race they have their own very decided views onwhat constitutes justice tempered with mercy and they noticed that Lord Widgery had gone on to pass some very 'surprising' sentences on their compatriots. He hasn't been invited to make a return visit.

But all that was back in '71. Since then Lord Widgery has made no great errors but neither has he made any great impression on his office. That being so, next week, with a presumption that is wholly alien to my nature, I shall offer him some suggestions as to how he, might put his Inns of Court in order. And bring English justice back into repute.

lain Scarlet, a specialist writer on crime and delinquency, conducts a weekly programme on these, and related matters on Radio London.