Respect, man

Respect, man: that is what it is all about. I have done plenty of cases where the motivation behind the alleged offending appears to be something to do with 'respect', and 'dissing' that respect due. Now respect in these cases is a funny old thing '“ a bit of a one-way street to be honest. In these cases the defendant's sense of his own self-respect normally exists in a bubble that appears not to allow space for respect for others. You know the sort of thing: the defendant's right to respect is mutually exclusive to the victim's right not to have a knife stabbed in their guts or a glass shoved in their face and so on.

Fortunately, such ego-centric notions of respect don't normally chime with a jury's sense of mutual respect and so the defendant ends up seething about the outrageous injustice of it all over the terms of a five-year stretch.

Out the window

This week we have heard of a different court '“ this is a new one on me and I suspect most people, but apparently there is, existing parallel to and indeed in ascendancy over the legal system, the 'court of public opinion'.

The right honourable Harriet Harman has decided that the law is actually irrelevant when it comes to politics '“ quite what her motivation is for identifying some parallel jurisdiction I shall leave to those political commentators who are presumably 'in the know' about what this is really about. But it is all very worrying indeed that respect for the rule of law goes right out of the window when things aren't going your way '“ somewhere on a spectrum with the knife-wielding defendant who decides that his idea of respect is the valid and unimpeachable one, rather than the law of the land's idea of what respect is. Harriet Harman has decided that the law does not count when it gets in the way, and that if it is in the way then retrospective legislation will do the trick.

Now I was not the most attentive of students but I do recall a faint ringing bell from my administrative law days that suggested retrospective legislation was altogether a bad thing and was not tolerated, apart from something called the War Damages Act. I may be wrong so don't bother to correct me, but the principle I think is true.

Out the door

Then we have had in the news more about respect: this is the research that has suggested that community penalties are devalued in the eyes of the public because defendants who are breached are not being punished properly and are walking away from court laughing '“ literally. I have to say that this is within my experience '“ often of a Friday have the sentences been passed out and the reaction of the defendant (always youthful, I should add) has been one of incredulous delight; the uncomfortable sense lingers that for some offenders the crime is almost worth it on a risk:benefit analysis as if you do get caught, do get prosecuted and do get convicted, the sentence is not too much of a burden. So here too there is an issue of respect '“ one that the law is not respected appropriately either by the defendants or the public or both. In these circumstances we need to examine why that is so, and correct it in some way.