Trial by tabloid
Ross Clark says we should leave Sion Jenkins alone: his acquittal was the mark of a civilised legal system Ihave no idea whether Sion Jenkins — the former Hastings deputy headmaster who was this week acquitted of murdering his foster daughter after juries in two successive trials failed to reach a verdict — committed the foul deed or not. I wasn’t there. Maybe Jenkins suffered one of the fits of rage which his former wife, Lois, now claims are part of his character and slugged poor Billie-Jo over the head because she had spilled paint on the carpet, then stuffed a piece of black bin-liner up her nose in a deliberate attempt to implicate the mysterious ‘Mr B.’, a lowlifer with a plastic fetish who used to frequent the park outside the Jenkinses’ home. Or maybe, as Jenkins himself maintains, he was lingering in B&Q’s white spirit department when the girl was attacked. All I do know is that had I been on the jury sifting through five months’ worth of evidence in one of the most eagerly followed murder trials of recent years, I would almost certainly have been one of those members who felt unable to convict. After three trials and nine years there has not been a single piece of convincing evidence which implicates Jenkins as the killer. And that, in any civilised legal system, would be that: the prisoner must go free.
Different rules apply, however, in Britain’s alternative legal system, otherwise known as tabloid journalism. Up until very recently, newspapers tended to accept an acquittal and shut up, no matter how much they would like to have crowned their lurid reporting of a case with pictures of the accused being bundled off to the Scrubs. Not any longer. The past few days have seen Jenkins tried for a fourth time in absentia the tabloids, though choosing their words very carefully, effectively reaching the verdict that it woz Jenkins wot done it. ‘What the jury was not told’, the Mail screamed on Friday, listing three pieces of ‘missing evidence’ it claims should have been presented in court. What evidence? Jenkins, according to Lois, had a foul temper and sometimes slapped her in the face, leading her on one occasion to hide in the loft. He is accused by his daughter, Annie, of once punching her in the stomach, and according to a woman tracked down by police through his address book, he once had an adulterous affair with her when she was 17.
Given that these allegations were never put before court, Jenkins has never had the opportunity properly to respond to them. But there are very good reasons for the judges in the latter two of Jenkins’s trials to decide they were inadmissible. Jenkins was facing a murder charge, not a divorce case. However horrid he might or might not have been towards his wife, slapping one’s spouse or having an affair does not automatically lead to battering a 13-year-old girl over the head with a tent peg; if it did, the child murder rate would be many times higher than it is. Moreover, Lois only made her accusations of marital violence after being convinced that her husband had murdered Billie-Jo, in particular during an appeal hearing in 2004, six years after the original trial, by which time she was living in Tasmania with another man. One cannot entirely dismiss them even if she did fail to complain about Sion Jenkins’s temper tantrums at the time: it is not an unknown phenomenon, as Theodore Dalrymple has frequently described in these pages, for battered women pathetically to defend the husbands who have been battering them. But to condemn a man to a life sentence on the basis of the way an embittered ex-wife says he mistreated her many years earlier?
Contrary to the assertion by the tabloids that Jenkins would now be safely behind bars had the juries in the latter two of his three trials not had important evidence withheld from them, the juries were presented with ample other evidence as to Jenkins’s character, but decided that it did not convince them he is a murderer. They knew that he had lied on his CV about going to Gordonstoun, and they were told by a former neighbour of the Jenkinses that Sion Jenkins had kicked Billie-Jo in the leg when he suspected she was malingering over an injured ankle. Appalling though Jenkins’s behaviour might have been on this occasion, it still does not get us any closer to the issue which really matters: whether he committed the murder or not. Only one piece of substantial evidence was ever presented by the prosecution to try to prove this: the presence of 158 microscopic spots of Billie-Jo’s blood found on Sion Jenkins’s fleece. But then, as the court was told in the latter two trials, there was an innocent explanation for this: that the dead girl could have showered Jenkins in a dying breath as he attended to her. Moreover, one has a faint suspicion that battering somebody over the head with a tent peg so hard that it shatters their skull might just leave one covered with rather more than microscopic spots of blood.
It would be reassuring to think, no matter what the tabloids said, that the law could always be relied upon to distinguish between actual evidence for the crime being considered and tittle-tattle about a suspect’s past behaviour. Unfortunately, legal process is moving towards the tabloids’ approach to justice. The Jenkins case has highlighted a little commentedupon change in the law under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which permits use of ‘bad character’ evidence in criminal trials. In future, juries will be fed much more in the way of previous affairs, acts of dishonesty and errors of judgment which have nothing to do with the crime under consideration, and invited to draw conclusions.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see where this could lead: accused of rape and with little evidence to prove it, the prosecution is now free to contact your spurned girlfriends for comment and to cite in court any visit you might have made to a porn website. Accused of causing death in a hitand-run accident and with no direct evidence that you or your vehicle were actually involved, the prosecution can now in theory trawl up your every speeding fine and the time you tried to hoodwink a traffic warden into believing you had only parked on a double yellow for two minutes while you popped into the chemist to pick up a prescription for your dying granny.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that so far there has been a rush of miscarriages of justice as a result of the 2003 Act. Nevertheless, the provisions which enable character evidence to be brought before the courts are there on the statute book, and it is fair to assume that the tabloids will remind us of them any time a prisoner with a slightly dodgy past is acquitted of a crime. In future, anyone accused of a crime rather like in a Lib Dem leadership election — will find their entire lifestyle and habits on trial. We are approaching the world of Albert Camus’s Outsider, where a man is condemned to death not so much because he killed a stranger — which he maintains was done in self-defence — but because he failed to cry at his mother’s funeral. A similar accusation has been levelled at Sion Jenkins in recent days: that he was too calm and ‘detached’ and failed to demonstrate sufficient grief on the recording of his 999 call after Billie-Jo’s death.
Ever since the death of the Princess of Wales we have been evolving into an emotionally incontinent society, where we are expected to start blubbing on cue, whenever the situation demands. But if it comes to murder suspects being sent down for life on the basis that they have failed to conform to the ‘correct’ emotions, or indeed as a result of any other perceived character flaws, it will be a sad day for justice.
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