“ In order for judges - of whatever gender - to be worth of respect, they must be committed to defending fundamental principles like the presumption of innocence and redress for the wrongly accused or convicted.
The Victor Nealon case is a most striking illustration of the fact that Lady Hale does not care about the latter principle.
Here is an extract from an as yet unpublished article – relating both to the absence of DNA from Victor Nealon and the mean-spirited Supreme court ruling.
The DNA testing not finally done until 2009 was to show that Victor Nealon’s DNA was completely absent from the relevant garments of the victim – the only DNA present being that of an unknown male. Any argument that Victor Nealon was a criminal able to ensure that no traces of his DNA remained at the scene of the crime – which would have been impossible given the circumstances in which the crime in question took place – does not merit serious consideration. Despite this, irrelevant arguments about DNA form part of the ruling by the Appeal Court, rendered on the 11th April 2016 – which could and should have decided that he deserves compensation for the appalling miscarriage of justice suffered by him, even according to the new law governing this.
The Supreme Court judgement, rendered on the 30th January 2019, upholds this denial of justice, all but an honourable minority of two senior judges, ignoring any arguments that can be made in favour of Victor Nealon and seeming to devote a lot of effort to arguing that the European Court of Human Rights should not rule that the principle of the presumption of innocence has been seriously undermines and that this exoneree should be compensated. In a newspaper interview conducted in 2015 Lady Brenda Hale argued inter alia that more women in senior legal positions would improve the justice system. Discrimination in this area as elsewhere is completely unjustified, but so too is her sweeping claim. It is essential that not only the men but also the women appointed to senior positions are ready defend fundamental principles of justice – if necessary, publicly – and, in addition to the required legal expertise and scholarship – as well as the relevant specialized managerial skills – that they are capable of caring about people who are wrongfully accused and wrongfully convicted.
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