Trial by tabloid

I have no idea whether Sion Jenkins — the former Hastings deputy headmaster who was this week acquitted of murdering his foster daughter after juries in two successive trials failed to reach a verdict — committed the foul deed or not. I wasn’t there. Maybe Jenkins suffered one of the fits of rage which his former wife, Lois, now claims are part of his character and slugged poor Billie-Jo over the head because she had spilled paint on the carpet, then stuffed a piece of black bin-liner up her nose in a deliberate attempt to implicate the mysterious ‘Mr B.’, a lowlifer with a plastic fetish who used to frequent the park outside the Jenkinses’ home. Or maybe, as Jenkins himself maintains, he was lingering in B&Q’s white spirit department when the girl was attacked. All I do know is that had I been on the jury sifting through five months’ worth of evidence in one of the most eagerly followed murder trials of recent years, I would almost certainly have been one of those members who felt unable to convict. After three trials and nine years there has not been a single piece of convincing evidence which implicates Jenkins as the killer. And that, in any civilised legal system, would be that: the prisoner must go free.

Different rules apply, however, in Britain’s alternative legal system, otherwise known as tabloid journalism. Up until very recently, newspapers tended to accept an acquittal and shut up, no matter how much they would like to have crowned their lurid reporting of a case with pictures of the accused being bundled off to the Scrubs. Not any longer. The past few days have seen Jenkins tried for a fourth time in absentia — the tabloids, though choosing their words very carefully, effectively reaching the verdict that it woz Jenkins wot done it.