Sometimes distinctions can be amusing.
The Billie-jo case: nasty unpleasant murder. Stupid cops (Sussex police, who make the Met look professional) desperate for a conviction in a high profile case. They spend, what, £10million+?, trying to nail an innocent man to a cross comprised of three separate major criminal trials. All the while allowing the real killer to get away.
Contrite? apologies all round? not entirely:
“the public would rightly expect the police to do everything they reasonably can to bring her [Billie-Jo’s] killer to justice.”
Well, everything except trying to actually catch the real killer it seems.
Of course some killers don’t need to be quite so concerned. These are members of a gang known for it’s violence, willingness to both silence witnesses and kill the innocent. Feared by other gangs they are known colloquially by the police criminal intelligence unit as ‘The Metropolitan Police Firearms Unit‘.
Rumours abound that the gang has massive influence with senior members of the police and even the most senior members of the government. This influence is believed to be behind the recent bizarre decision not to prosecute two gang members caught in the act of executing a man carrying a double barrelled sawn-off table leg. The two raised the ludicrous defence that the victim was wielding the table leg in a threatening manner; nonetheless their friends in power released them without charge. So, in contradistinction with Jenkins, two undisputed and unrepentant killers have had no money spent on prosecuting them.
Moral: join the right gang.
Its easy to blame the Police. But if they hadn’t gone all out to convict the killer they would also have been criticised. The danger with serious cases is that the police can decide too early on who the killer must be, then go all out to to ensure the evidence they collect nails that person.
Consider also that most murders are committed by a person known to the victim. The liklihood of being murdered by a stranger in a dark alleyway is extremely low. You are far more likely to be murdered by your partner..
Sion Jenkins has been aquitted because two successive juries failed to reach a verdict. I know little about the facts of the case, but I understand that the case turns on complex forensic evidence. There is an argument that it is too much to expect a lay jury to decide between experts. However if two eminently qualified experts cannot agree then the jury is surely bound to resolve any doubt in favour of the defendant.
As regards mistaken shooting by the police: its easy to sit and pass judgement from the safety of your desk. Far less easy when life and death decisions have to be made in a split second in hostile circumstances when your own life may be in danger.
Really? You see, i remember reading the huge diagram the Sun published on the day they shot that Brazillian guy and thinking “thank god he deserved it, because that was a bad shooting”. It is easy to say so. But it is also occasionally correct to say so.