tim's experiment

If oyu don’t remember who Mr Zinger was that is prob ably because you are not a serious Bob Dylan fan. Mr Zinger, a rich young man, killed a waitress in a Baltimore hotel and was jailed for a mere six months. Dylan’s song about the case is a small masterpiece, though not one of his much-covered ones. Perhaps it is a bit too long.

Anyway Mr Zinger came to mind because there has been much discussion lately about the way in which the law treats, or doesn’t treat, defendants with rich daddies and other attributes like, as the song has it, “friends in high office in the politics of Maryland”, or the local equivalent. This has always been a delicate topic. Teachers of law will tell you at an early stage that one of the characteristics of the Common Law is that all people who appear in the courts are treated equally. As in principle they are. We all recognise that the practice does not quite come out like that. One of the important functions of the law is to protect property, and this is of little interest to those who have little of it. Judges tend to come from a sheltered and educated background; defendants do not.  Anatole France wrote of “the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” An Englishman observed more succinctly that “the Courts of Law are open to all – like the Ritz Hotel”.  To put it bluntly, we all know that if you are a rich bitch with good connections and an expensive lawyer you can get away with almost anything short of murder (sorry, Nancy) whereas the outlook for Tin Shui Wai housewives fresh off the China train is less rosy. Such is life.

Still it is usual for magistrates and judges to go to some lengths to conceal this. And this is a useful convention, because they then have to think seriously about the issues of principle involved. So while unstirred by the affaire Bokhari I am quite disturbed that the magistrate shamelessly explained his benevolent approach to sentencing by referring to the defendant’s “well-off background”. Still this was a minor peccadillo compared with another case later in the week, in which the magistrate, jailing a man for indecent assault, said he would not risk the abuse he would get from the newspapers if he succumbed to a request for a non-custodial sentence for such a serious offence.  Leaving aside the question whether indecent assault is such a serious offence, this violates an important principle of judgeship. Magistrates and judges should not read newspapers if they can’t handle comments on their work. You boys and girls better all write out 200 times this quote from Lord Justice Salmon: “I am quite convinced that no judge … would be influenced in any way by anything he read in the newspapers. If he were he would not be fit to be a judge.”