Rewarding the truth

If Lord Woolf is discovered ’orribly murdered in his cellar, the editor of the Daily Mail may well find himself helping police with their inquiries. There will certainly be a motive: the Lord Chief Justice is not a popular figure with the self-professed keeper of Middle England values. In response to his lordship’s proposal to reduce the effective sentence for murder to ten years in some instances where the accused admits guilt, the Mail ventured: ‘Rarely has a Lord Chief Justice seemed so smug, self-satisfied and remote while the law he is supposed to uphold sinks deeper into disrepute.’ Comparisons spring to mind with Nero, twanging away on his lyre as Rome burned around him. Yet again, the paper seems to say, our safety is threatened by some pinko law lord who sees the route to his own greatness in making magnanimous gestures towards murderous rogues from whom he, unlike the rest of us, is insulated in the corner of some port-soaked gentlemen’s club.

We do not view Lord Woolf’s proposals so negatively. As the Lord Chief Justice makes clear, there are only two types of murderer who will qualify for earlier release under his scheme: he who admits his guilt with ‘absolute candour’, long before his trial, and he who confesses to his crime when he knows there is a good chance that he could have escaped conviction through lack of evidence. At present few murderers will qualify, for the simple reason that most of them, even when caught with blood on their hands, choose to adopt the ‘what me, sir?’ attitude of a guilty schoolboy. When they have done the deed, they hide the body. When the police come calling, they come up with an alibi. When they are rumbled and charged, they concoct some cock-and-bull story about how the victim must have slipped on to the knife.