When a Stipendiary Magistrate uses his position to blacken, or
attempt to blacken, the character of a witness who gives evidence in his court, what remedy or redress is at the witness's command ? The answer, I suppose, is None. When Mr. Ivan Snell, the Stipendiary Magistrate at Marylebone, addressed a witness last week in the outrageous words: " There are evil things in this world and it strikes me that you can be numbered among them,"
he was using language calculated to damn the witness in every circle in which he may move. His offence in the magistrate's eyes was that he had given a conscientious objector advice of which he, the magistrate, did not approve. The advice apparently was that the youth should follow his conscience—which led him to what I personally think the unfortunate conclusion that he should stick to a job in the theatre instead of doing the agricultural or forestry work which the court had prescribed as an alternative to military service. For this, the witness in question, Mr. Fletcher, who is a well-known member of the Society of Friends and a man of unblemished probity, is denounced from the bench as "an evil thing," and in consequence becomes a feature of the day throughout the popular Press. Fortunately, men of sober judgement will decide without much difficulty whether it is its author or its object that such an observation damns.
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