In contrast to the many stranglers and IRA terrorists who have become cause célèbres for justice campaigners over the years, there has been no audible campaign claiming that Rolf Harris, jailed in 2014 for 12 historic sex offences, is a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Nevertheless, the failure yesterday of an attempt to convict him on further charges ought to raise the question: should we really be spending vast amounts of time and money prosecuting offences which are pretty low down the scale and which happened decades ago but were never reported until recently?
Of course it is an offence to put your hand up the skirt of a 14-year-old girl – one of the charges against Harris on which the jury failed to reach a verdict. But you don’t have to be a member of the happily-defunct Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) to wonder whether it is really such a serious offence to be prosecuted 46 years after it is alleged to have happened, long after anyone can really be expected to know where they were and what they were doing on any particular day.
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