The Scots Law Student

No photos - Jules Mattsson C 2010

The police have once again displayed their enviable ability to be very quotable while saying Bond villain ominous things. The current one is a 16 year freelance photojournalist who was photographing a major parade that was walking down a high street. It’s a situation that is so public, so common and so clearly photograph-able that stopping someone doing it is a bit ridiculous.

The worst thing I took from that was when the photographer was almost arrested for swearing (at 5:55 in the video). Because the police officer had pushed him down some stairs. That’s a modern version of the classic “breaking a policeman’s foot with your face”.

He did really pretty well there. It’s hard to keep as calm as that in these situations, especially if you’re getting poked, grabbed, shoved and implicitly accused of crimes ranging from spying (taking photos of the military) to child abuse (taking photos of children) to terrorism (annoying the police) by a large group of people with weapons, a reputation of this sort of thing and state backing. This wouldn’t even be an story if he hadn’t managed to record it.

You don’t really want to talk to the police, because it doesn’t benefit you to do so. The very best that will happen to you after talking to the police is that you’ll continue to do what you were already doing and not be arrested, but if the police are restricting your rights like this you’re really faced with no option but to question what they’re doing. The police need authority to do anything, that’s how civil liberties work – if something’s not a crime it’s not a crime to do it. There’s an element of creating a paper trial in these situations – you want some extra proof of what happened because you don’t want to end up with your word against a police officer. Ask them if you’re detained, what law they’re enforcing and if you’re free to go. Definitely try to get their names, numbers etc so that you can identify them later. I do wonder what would happen if you said you want to take a photo of the officer because it will let you identify the officer when you complain but that is why you want a photo of the officer if possible. It’s not illegal to photograph/film police officers and the IPCC has refused to investigate complaints, even quite serious ones, where the officer can’t be identified by the person making the complaint.

The officer in this story changed his story constantly and, although it is possible the 16 year old Jules was a spy or a child abuser or a terrorist or behaving antisocially or blocking traffic, the odds of him being all five at the same time are seriously pretty unlikely. If you’re doing something wrong the police can arrest you for that, they don’t five different things. The police should have identified what he was doing wrong at least before they pushed him down the stairs if not before they spoke to him to begin with.

Luckily there’s an audio recording, there’s photos of the officers, there’s a whole lot of press coverage (Independent). There were four figure settlements paid to photographers for similar police misconduct the day before. It should be reasonably easy for him to get this sorted out. I do wish him luck.

The sad thing to remember is that the substantial settlement he is almost certain to get from the police for this incident comes straight out of tax payer funds. This is wrong. Make the officer pay it – it’s their fault after all. The police officers who are doing their jobs correctly and are protecting the public can spend the money they aren’t paying out when they mess up from their budgets on new ways to protect tax payers (and students).

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What already was one of the most ridiculously obvious cases of systemic governmental wagon circling we’ve seen in recent years got even more ridiculous this week.

The police officer who shoved Ian Tomlinson to the ground minutes before his death has escaped any responsibility for his actions. This is despite widespread public outrage, a video of the event, three post-mortems and a 15 month long investigation by the CPS. It’s nice that the government are spending so much taxpayer money on this but they really shouldn’t have bothered – we’ve not seen any return on it. The Guardian has uncovered more evidence than they have.

The decision by the CPS not to do anything about the attack is pretty rotten, to say the least, because they say that they have investigated the evidence and there is no hope of proving the manslaughter case beyond reasonable doubt. Fair enough, some people say, but we’ve got a video of him being shoved to the ground – what about trying him for assault? No, say the CPS, because the 6 month time bar for that charge has passed. Lots of people say, why didn’t the CPS bring the assault charge within the 6 month limit then? Because, say the CPS, they couldn’t because of an ongoing investigation into the incident… by the CPS.

If the CPS are mentioned a lot in that paragraph it’s because they’ve been instrumental in making this tragedy into the farce it now is.

The family of Ian Tomlinson are now collecting money to do it themselves. In the monumentally unlikely event that they are allowed to have a private (not public) prosecution (it would very possibly be the only one we will see in our lifetimes – there have only ever been two in Scotland and they’re not much more common down south) they would present their evidence to a jury instead. It will be horrendously expensive for them, it’s possibly the most expensive court action there is, and it seems to be the only way it will ever get to a trial.

The authorities have done a poor job with this case and if they really have to mess it up the very least they should expect is to have to resign when they get called on how badly their mess stinks.

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It’s very important to note that the full facts of the Israel Flotilla situation are not clear and it is unlikely, given the amount of emotion that it has generated, that it will ever be fully known. I wasn’t on the ship so I have no idea what went on but I do await an independent inquiry. Personally it stinks to me, there are a lot of broad criticisms that “international law isn’t real law” but that doesn’t apply here, the two big areas of international law that are enforced and people follow are how to treat diplomats and how to treat shipping. No one ignores Vienna because you don’t want your own diplomats hassled in return and the same applies for shipping. You have to go a really long way to be able to justifiably board foreign flagged, civilian ships transporting aid to your enemy. It’s a presumption that shipping shouldn’t get messed with and really you have to prove why you should be able to rather than other people proving you shouldn’t.

That said, I think it is weird that so much is made about if the ship should have been there or not. The implication seems to be is if the ship shouldn’t have been there, if what it was carrying was bad, its mission was inflammatory or if they were violent when boarded then the boarding, shooting etc was justified. I think firstly that last one’s arguing from the consequences but secondly the earlier ones are also forms of the they were asking for it defence.

It’s a strange argument that crops up in quite a few areas – for example non-consensual sex is often “distinguished” from rape on the basis that the victim was asking for it. I’m not convinced this is much of an argument, even if you really were asking for it. In consent based crimes literally asking for it’s a pretty good legal place to be (this is called giving consent) but, for example, if it’s dressing provocatively then it’s not really you asking for it. In intention based crimes it’s even less helpful – a bank robber who kills a hostage who says “shoot me instead” isn’t going to get off. The idea is simply that a bank robber shouldn’t shoot anyone whether they’re asking it for it or not. Part of living in a functional society is learning to not shoot the people you think are asking for it because eventually everyone would get shot at least once (even if just in self defence).

In this case the formal name for the asking for it defence is a red herring – it diverts attention from the original question. The answer to “was Israel right to have landed soldiers on the ship” isn’t “what was the ship doing there in the first place?” it’s really a qualitative opinion along the lines of “yes” or “no”. Similarly “was X right to have non-consensual penetrative intercourse with Y” isn’t answered with “did Y accept a free drink from X?” It’s fairly subtle and superficially seems on topic but it’s a digression all the same. The ethical guideline is that you don’t get to do bad things to people just because they’ve done bad things themselves, and logically if that was the case that would just mean that other people are allowed to do bad things to you (and no normal person thinks this). This is the general argument for why burglars don’t leave their human rights at the door.

That’s not to say that asking for it is not a good argument in some cases. It is an established principle in delict (tort if you’re a big silly and aren’t Scottish) that no actionable injury results from one who puts themselves into a dangerous situation and sustains reasonably foreseeable harm (so, for example, if you are injured during a tackle while playing football you can’t sue the other player whereas if he pulls out a gun and shoots you you can). So if you actually are asking for it you generally can’t sue for damages later on. Where you can pull it out is quite limited, by virtue of being a consent based defence, because it’s not enough to just know it’s dangerous but you have to actually consent to being hurt and that’s quite tough. Generally people use contributory negligence to be an easier form of this. It’s of limited use in criminal law and, for example, there are a large number of cases where wholly consensual sadomasochism was judged to be ABH (and in R v Brown the victims were even judged to be aiding and abetting their own actual bodily harm, which possibly reflects attitudes to homosexuality rather than, y’know, justice)

The interesting thing about this is that the asking for it defence isn’t even a particularly thorny issue and if you ask them directly people generally accept that raped women don’t actually ask for it, but that it is so intuitively attractive. People like a good guy and a bad guy and stories where both people are, if not actually as bad as each other, at least lacking clean hands are just depressing. We like to go “well, that burglar shouldn’t have been robbing the house, give him both barrels” when really it’s important to stop and say “why should the other man have given him both barrels?” This is why people like making up brutal things to do to paedophiles or terrorists, it’s easy.

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I have always believed that the Conservative criticism of the Human Rights Act and support for a Bill of Rights is a clever bit of double think that allows them to blame Labour for unpopular decisions but not appear entirely fascist if someone criticises them for wanting to get rid of human rights. To that end I don’t really believe anything will actually change now they’re in power but grudging kudos to whoever thought of that campaign slogan.

I don’t think the Conservatives can really come up with a bundle of fundamental freedoms that didn’t occur to the drafters of the UN declaration or the European convention. There are genuine European substantive law issues that limit what they could say but, more to the point, once you get beyond rights to life and a fair trial; freedom of expression and gathering; and freedom from torture and so on you’re limited in what you can really put out as a human right anyway. “Broadband internet” is hardly human rights material, for example.

The main problem clouding this whole issue is that there is some woeful misreporting of the juicy HRA stories – at the previous election David Davis campaigned with the anecdote of a inmate who went to court seeking to enforce his human right to hardcore pornography. This is true, it happened. However what also happened is the judge laughed in his face and told him to get back to prison. That bit doesn’t make so much news. We risk repealing a piece of our constitutional framework because some people we don’t like have the temerity to go to court and unsuccessfully try to use it.

The current news is that two terror suspects can’t be deported because they face torture if they go back. The problem is that the authorities only suspect they’re terrorists but can’t convince any court that they are. That’s what suspected means. Basically some detective has a hunch. Detectives get hunches all the time, some times it’s just something they ate.

We have no idea what evidence failed to convince a judge that they were terrorists because the evidence, and the trial it was heard in, is secret. The reason given is that they don’t want to reveal their sources and I suspect that’s probably true. I just don’t know if it that’s because it’s a rubbish source that’s given ridiculously poor evidence that’s been pulled out of an orifice or if it really is some impossibly dashing secret agent bedding femme fatales while drinking martinis and driving fast cars. We wouldn’t get to hear about the evidence either way. The question in my mind has boiled down to “is the government more likely to employ James Bond or Mr Bean?” This is what I’m reduced to in trying to evaluate my own country’s counter-terrorism policy.

In the absence of an open trial process we’re left having to take the people who can’t grit the roads or tender building contracts properly at their word when they say they genuinely have caught a bad person. Even crazier is that the person they say they’ve caught has to take their word on this too because they aren’t told what they did or what the evidence is either. I never understood that — what sort of secret are you protecting by not telling them, surely they already found out when they did it in the first place?

The immigration tribunal service is not a shining example of common sense — it once told an homosexual Iranian it wanted to deport that it was safe to be gay in Iran as long as you don’t tell anyone (the authorities had recently decided to hang the man’s partner from a lamppost) — and should simply not be treated with implicit confidence in abilities that they don’t demonstrate.

You certainly don’t need to throw the baby of the Human Rights Act out with the bathwater of the Daily Mail.

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A trade union has one purpose, to back you up if you have a dispute with your employer. That’s literally its job. Some of the trade union Unite’s members have a dispute with their employer, a lot of people are scratching their head about what the complaint is actually about (Ryanair makes BA’s conditions look immensely generous, for example) but they have a dispute nonetheless.

One of the most potent tools that trade unions have always had is the ability to withdraw their labour. Anyone can strike without a trade union – you just don’t work, however it leaves you at extreme risk of being made unemployed because “you didn’t come to work” is often fairly safe grounds for dismissal. The trade union gives you security because, firstly, if everyone strikes at the same time it gives you greater bargaining power but secondly they can’t get everyone and recent labour law statutes mean that they can’t get you for striking. Early trade unionists in Glasgow were routinely beaten to the point of permanent injury or death because strikes could be so damaging to employers, we’ve progressed a lot since then and now you need to take a vote of your members and give the employers fair notice. No employer likes employees who go on wildcat strikes and this is the balance we’ve struck.

Central to this is the trade union which becomes immensely powerful because it is the gatekeeper to the ability to strike. It’s basically what a trade union does – you pay your sub to your union so that, if you have an employment problem, they’ll back you up with bigger guns than you can muster alone.

Unite’s BA members want a strike, they absolutely, definitely do but Unite has failed to arrange it properly twice. I thought that Unite would be careful with the i’s that need dotted and the t’s that need crossed because it’s a high profile dispute. I thought that when BA managed to interdict the strike that their lawyer was a genius who had absolutely earned his fee but said, and these are the exact words I used at the time:

They’ll never manage to do that again

I thought it was a masterful, albeit desparate, strike by an employer using a sneaky technical point in the hope of staving off the damage that a strike would cause. I naturally assumed that Unite would turn around and immediately call another vote and this time cross every t they could possibly think of. If it was me I would have even considered hiring BA’s lawyer to check I was crossing all the t’s.

Unite have had another injunction granted against them stopping their next series of strikes for voting irregularities. This isn’t cool Unite, your members are relying on you. Yes ballots for industrial action are fiddly, highly technical things but you are an organisation that does ballots for industrial action. Souffle is fiddly to do too but if you want to be an organisation who makes souffle you just have to learn how to do them.

Third time’s the charm?

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I know McClaren as a luxury car manfacturer but it turns out that they also make other things – like buggies for children.

The problem I have with the claims – that if your child’s hand gets caught in the moving parts it may lose a finger is not that it happened (it did) nor that it is horrible (it totally is), what amazes me is that at least 47 parents responded to their pram being hard to open and their child starting to cry is to force the pram open and amputate their flesh and blood’s finger. That seems horrible to me. Certainly it was wrong to design sharp edges which scissor together when the product is used but I don’t buy Richard Langton’s quote in the Express today – “we are delighted to get the agreement within three months of being instructed to act, and it proves the adult opening the buggy is not in any way at fault.”

I think we should instead look to the old legal proverb handed down through the ages – “if you manage to saw off your own child’s finger it is ok to feel guilty about it.”

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Logic is very important to law. Depending on who you ask it’s all there is to law. A problem that lawyers have is that they have somewhat given up the advantage of surprise the moment they say they’re a lawyer – I don’t know how effective emotive pleas are if they come from someone you know is being paid to say it regardless of their personal feelings. I think it takes the shine off it slightly. That leaves you with logical argument to persuade people with.

There are a lot of other areas where logic is also extremely important. Causation in science is probably the biggest example in normal life. Homoeopathy is getting a lot of attention lately as the low-hanging fruit of implausible alternative therapies and a lot is being made of the niggling issue that bruises which go away may not go away because of the infinitesimally small amount of water in which arsenic was dissolved but then diluted away you drank. The sceptic community is very vocal about people who use this sort of thing as proof that homoeopathy can cure everything.

“I feel it worked for me, therefore it works for everyone” is not good logic, it’s technically called “inductive logic” which is generally fine as long as you question your presumptions (eg, that it actually did work for you) and don’t rely on it too much. Of course, if your entire argument is extrapolating a major premise from a minor premise, stop and get a new argument. It probably won’t stand up very well. You can get away with it if no one challenges it but the problem with legal disputes is that someone generally does.

Theskepticguide.org have compiled a list of 20 of the most common logical fallacies that they experience. It’s really worth using them as cautionary tales so that you don’t end up getting stuck with an argument that cannot withstand scrutiny.

Ad hominem

An ad hominem argument is any that attempts to counter anothers claims or conclusions by attacking the person, rather than addressing the argument itself. True believers will often commit this fallacy by countering the arguments of skeptics by stating that skeptics are closed minded. Skeptics, on the other hand, may fall into the trap of dismissing the claims of UFO believers, for example, by stating that people who believe in UFO’s are crazy or stupid.

This is very common in normal life and I’ve fallen for this one myself – it’s very tempting to spend your time as a respondent proving that a claimant is a bad person who deserved what happens to them when actually what you need to do is look at what you’re required to prove under applicable law.

Slippery Slope

This logical fallacy is the argument that a position is not consistent or tenable because accepting the position means that the extreme of the position must also be accepted. But moderate positions do not necessarily lead down the slippery slope to the extreme.

Although this is a logical fallacy it is a perfectly acceptable policy argument. It is often within a court’s discretion to consider policy arguments, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable actually relying on it to any great extent just because it’s so vulnerable to questions like “yeah, but what if we don’t immediately go out and kill all the children?”. There’s a lot you can say in an essay that a court might do that a court might never actually do.

Tautology

tautology is an argument that utilizes circular reasoning, which means that the conclusion is also its own premise. The structure of such arguments is A=B therefore A=B, although the premise and conclusion might be formulated differently so it is not immediately apparent as such. For example, saying that therapeutic touch works because it manipulates the life force is a tautology because the definition of therapeutic touch is the alleged manipulation (without touching) of the life force.

I actually really disagree with this one, I think what they mean to say here is just “circular argument”. If you really can base your argument on a tautology you’re actually on excellent logical ground. A tautology is something that is necessarily true. A circular argument is terrible, unhelpful to you and should always be avoided but if you rely on something that logically has to be true (or the universe doesn’t work) you’re not going to be wrong about it. For example “an armed robber is a robber who has a weapon” is a tautology, which means that if you can prove (to the standard of proof) the two points of 1) he was a robber and 2) he had a weapon he must be an armed robber, if you’re prosecuting him for armed robbery this is exactly what you’re there to prove. I find it really helps me to work out what legal issues are at question if I actively try, as much as possible, to reduce all logical questions to tautologies.

Tu quoque

Literally, you too. This is an attempt to justify wrong action because someone else also does it. “My evidence may be invalid, but so is yours.”

As far as I’m concerned as a bright eyed, idealistic LLB student who sees the world in strictly black and white this is the worst thing ever. It turns out, surprisingly, that bad things can happen to bad people. There’s simply no good reason why someone who did something wrong shouldn’t be able to get legal remedy for wrongs done to them.

This is why, for example, Napier v Scottish Ministers was right to grant Article 3 relief to a prisoner who was held in inhuman conditions even though he was in jail (if I recall correctly he was even awaiting trial at that point – merely accused). There’s no good reason to breach the human rights of people held in jail. It doesn’t work to say “well, they’re bad so you can be bad to them.” That just doesn’t follow – it’s a tu quoque fallacy.

Unstated Major Premise

This fallacy occurs when one makes an argument which assumes a premise which is not explicitly stated. For example, arguing that we should label food products with their cholesterol content because Americans have high cholesterol assumes that: 1) cholesterol in food causes high serum cholesterol; 2) labeling will reduce consumption of cholesterol; and 3) that having a high serum cholesterol is unhealthy. This fallacy is also sometimes called begging the question.

This is an important one – it’s so important to challenge your own presumptions when you’re looking at any legal problem. I think the best example I ever had was a time I was (too) casually reading a hypothetical scenario and I assumed the guy did it and actually he hadn’t. As you might guess this had an effect on what my answer ended up being. Law school essays get around this, through IRAC, by very much encouraging you to spell everything out.

They have a much longer list at the above link that’s worth checking out.

But, on a personal note, the big one that annoys me more for reading comprehension reasons than any logical issues is:

Begging the question

(So annoying I’ve mentioned it twice)

This does not mean you need to immediately state the question that you think needs asked. When it says “beg” it doesn’t actually ask for the question, it just means someone is assuming a principle. It means that the other person hasn’t asked a question they should have asked, not that you need to suggest one.

“That begs the question – what colour is my bike?” is a pet peeve of mine. It just means that someone assumes your bike is yellow when they should investigate their foundational principles. It doesn’t mean you should tell them they should ask you what colour your bike is. Just say either “you’re begging the question there” or “you need to ask [x]” but avoid saying both.

H/T to Crispian Jago.

You might also want to check out the gripping blog of Diane Levin who every month, like clockwork, debunks a logical fallacy. I’ve covered it on the blog before and it’s excellent.

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Law Actually has covered the decision of the Court of Appeal that a teenager left with brain damage after a crash was not contributorily negligent in his injuries.

This is a case which it seems immediately apparent is a bit strange – the victim was in a car being driven (by someone else) at more than twice the speed limit, while not wearing a seatbelt and even carrying a passenger on his knee down a country road. It seems pretty inevitable that something would go wrong with that setup, yet it wasn’t the victim’s fault that he got hurt (arguably, in a but for sense).

There are times when the victim, though injured by someone else, is not totally blameless in his actions. This creates situations where people who are quite obviously at fault can win delicts against other people, which can seem a little unjust. One way of dealing with this is to subtract a portion of the damages payout to account for their contribution to the injury.

Contribution is one of the most important parts of many cases – I recently participated in an excellent mock employment tribunal training session very generously run by a commercial firm in the city where the employer’s poor dismissal procedure was saved by a 100% contribution because of the employee’s actions. It’s a hollow victory if you beat someone in court but don’t get any money.

However if you act negligently but don’t, provably, contribute to your injury (like here) you can escape the contribution. Your contribution to your injury is a question of fact and it seems that expert evidence couldn’t make the link.

However Michael, and I have to agree with him here, points out that there are massive policy implications in this case. I suspect that the whole case came down to just about two policy decisions – do you support a seriously injured person who needs to finance long term care (hence the court action) or do you make a statement about seatbelt safety. Showing that hard cases make bad law it seems difficult to take a paternalistic stance when the claimant is quite as vulnerable as he is in this case. I don’t think that’s a suitable reason to decide either way and I don’t think that’s what the court used – since the necessary causal link was unproven – but it makes it emotive nonetheless.

Safety devices in vehicles is quite a difficult area – there are some occasions where, for example wearing a bike helmet actually makes some injuries worse and generally failing to land on your head negates the benefit in wearing a helmet at all. The Libertarians don’t believe that it’s even justifiable that the state should make a policy of using safety devices at all since it’s personal choice. I think that there are a lot of reasons that someone would or wouldn’t wear a seatbelt and I question how much this case, an appellate court upholding that a teenager with severe brain damage should get the full damages, will really influence teenagers to drive dangerously or for people to not wear a seatbelt.

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The Terrorism Act 2000 allows the government to proscribe groups which:

commits or participates in acts of terrorism, prepares for, promotes or encourages terrorism or is otherwise concerned in terrorism”.

The reason I mention this is that I last heard it being used by Alan Johnson as a nuclear option against Islam4UK, the attention seeking publicity whore of a personal quest for fame that wanted to protest the killing of Muslims by British soldiers by marching with fake coffins through the place where British soldiers were marching with real coffins and so proving that you don’t need to be big, a real group or even serious about doing it to be terrifically inappropriate.

I’ve always regarded the implications of proscribing a group under the 2000 Act as ludicrously excessive – it makes it a custodial, terrorist related offence to not report seeing someone displaying the group’s logo, even if it’s being displayed ironically. It also makes it possible to go to jail for a terrorist offence if you own an ironic t-shirt. It’s just false advertising to me – these are just not what you think of when you hear “terrorist offences” and yet the Terrorism Act is what you’d be charged under.

However, the recent judgement in the trial of R (Binyam Mohammed) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and particularly Lord Neuberger’s comments at paragraph 168, which are currently unpublished, but to quote Jonathan Sumption were something like:

1. that the Security Service does not in fact operate in a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques;
2. that this was in particular true of Witness B whose conduct was in this respect characteristic of the service as a whole (‘it appears likely that there were others’);
3. that officials of the Service deliberately misled the Intelligence and Security Committee on this point;
4. that this reflects a culture of suppression in its dealings with the Committee, the Foreign Secretary and indirectly the Court, which penetrates the service to such a degree as to under any UK government assurances based on the Service’s information and advice; and
5. that the Service has an interest in suppressing information which is shared, not by the Foreign Secretary himself (whose good faith is accepted), but by the Foreign Office for which he is responsible.

So, bearing in mind point i, are we in a position where the Home Secretary may make it a crime to be a member of our intelligence services? Obviously not, even I’m not serious about the idea and I’m suggesting it on my blog. The thing is, he could.

NB: The inhuman treatment (David Miliband is at pains to point out that “inhuman treatment” isn’t quite as bad as “torture”, which is the sort of statement that makes you want to punch Foreign Secretaries in the face) Binyam Mohammed received includes “genital mutilation” – basically while Mohammed was in Morocco someone, presumably to make him answer questions, took a razor blade to his gentleman area. Speaking as a guy this is never acceptable and means that I, and half of the population of the world, sympathise with him on general principle. Great job, SyS.

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I’m politically liberal, I believe in a small state and I believe in the right to autonomy. Therefore, you’d assume, I’d be one of those wondering “how could a bereaved mother [Kay Gilderdale] be put through the agony of a trial for attempted murder?”

In fact, I think one of the most vital things that the state should limit itself to doing is, when it finds one citizen attempting to end the life of another, to come along and ask in a comically plummy voice, “what’s going on here then?”

I was reading Gilderdale’s trial was horrific but necessary to retain a vital principle – Madeline Bunting in today’s Guardian and thought that she was really spot on. I have my own issues with assisted suicide but I think her observations are vitally important too, particularly in that it’s important not to subtly (or not) encourage people to end their own lives. I’d hope you wouldn’t tell a man on a bridge to jump, so you wouldn’t do it to an elderly relative either.

I think calls that the Gilderdale trial was a mistake are entirely wrong. I think that we need to be careful to watch who we put on trial but if someone is connected with the suspicious, non-natural death of a human being (let’s hypothetically say my death) they should damn well have to explain what they were doing. People who try to end others’ lives are not the sort of people we need to keep out of court. I don’t like the idea of accepting things which let you kill people – I don’t think it ends well.

I think if you kill someone in self defence you should have to show that it was self defence, if you were provoked you should have to show that you were provoked. Self defence lets you get away with murder, we really need to be careful with that. I think if someone claims they killed someone to end their suffering they should equally have to show that they did it to end their suffering and regardless, because every single murder victim in history was going to die eventually anyway, if they were actually OK with living in suffering that should never ever be a defence.

The problem with all of homicide defences based on the victim’s conduct (self defence, battered wife syndrome, assisted suicide etc) is that it is very hard to get the victim’s side of things afterwards. It’s hard to say you didn’t hit your wife after your murder, for example, and it’s also hard to say you didn’t consent to your death. If someone wishes to escape responsibility on the basis that you wanted to die and they were only carrying out your wishes I would humbly want someone to check that out.

We don’t have a legal right to die, we have an absolute certainty to it. What we do have is a right to life. If someone dies, potentially in very violent circumstances, it is a big deal and we should accept that. There are many reason that a carer might kill their patient, or even a mother might kill her daughter which have nothing to do with dignity or choice or love or anything else that is good.

I would hate for my murderer to get off because I was sick. Don’t just take their word for it.

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