Matthew Scott is a criminal barrister at Pump Court Chambers
What is a suitable punishment for those who kill a policeman? For PC Andrew Harper’s widow, Lissie, the sentences given to her husband’s teenage killers – a maximum of 16 years – were woefully insufficient. Many agreed. And now Lissie Harper has started a petition calling for ‘Harper’s law’. Half a million people have signed up,
Prominent amongst the achievements of the current government has been the establishment of a battalion of ministerial taskforces. We now have the culture renewal taskforce, the waste taskforce, the infrastructure delivery taskforce, the libraries taskforce, the university research and knowledge exchange sustainability taskforce and the roadmap taskforce (whose onerous task it is to coordinate no
One of Julian Assange’s many gifts to the law was to establish in the case of Assange v. Swedish Judicial Authority that where a woman consents to sexual intercourse on condition that the man is wearing a condom, he commits the offence of rape – in English as well as Swedish law – if they
In 1739 a London attorney called John Theobald fell into a dispute with a man called John Drinkwater, widely regarded as ‘the most litigious Fellow in London’. Theobald met with Drinkwater’s enemies in a Holbourn tavern, and they decided ‘the Way to perplex Drinkwater and bring him to Terms, was to indict him for Barretry
Jolyon Maugham QC got up early on Boxing Day morning, put on his wife’s satin kimono, went into his garden and bludgeoned a fox to death with a baseball bat. He then announced what he had done on Twitter. There is no mystery about why he killed the fox. It had come to eat his
Victims Commissioner Vera Baird says the ‘double jeopardy’ rule – which prevents a person being tried for the same offence twice – should not apply in certain cases to those acquitted of less serious crimes against children. This is a big mistake. It would make Britain’s rules on double jeopardy – a legal principle established for thousands
It is both very stupid and a criminal offence to drive whilst using a hand-held mobile phone. The reason is obvious: it is distracting and dangerous. On 19th August 2017 Ramsey Barreto was driving past the aftermath of a serious accident in Ruislip when a police officer saw him holding up his phone and using
Jeremy Corbyn, Shami Chakrabarti and Harriet Harman all have difficulties with the idea of complainants in rape cases being asked to hand over their mobile phones as part of a police investigation. Corbyn has described it as a ‘disturbing move’. It is nothing of the sort. No change in the law has taken place. Instead,
Speaking on the radio this morning, the Foreign Secretary refused the temptation to condemn the Legal Aid Authority’s grant of legal aid to Shamima Begum. He was right to do so. We give legal aid to those accused of murder and genocide. This is not because we have sympathy with murderers and genocidal killers but
At the end of last week the Court of Appeal explained why it had upheld the conviction of a grandfather – who can be identified only as ‘SB’ – for sexually abusing his granddaughter, even though that same granddaughter told the court, under oath, that he is innocent. The granddaughter, identified in the judgment as ‘M’,
This week the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, decided not to allow Shamima Begum to return to this country, stripping her of her British citizenship and arguing that she is instead the responsibility of Bangladesh. His decision to do so has not been universally popular, but others have argued that the UK should not go easy
The greatest criminal barrister of all time, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, who probably saved more men and women from the gallows than anyone in English history, was famous for his ‘scales of justice’ speech, in which, as described in Sally Smith’s magnificent biography, he would stand for several long minutes with his arms outstretched
Between 2010 and 2015 the Ministry of Justice endured amongst the deepest cuts of any government department. Yet even as over £2 billion was saved by closing courts, cutting legal aid and allowing prisons to become dangerous, rat-infested, spice-ridden hell-holes, the Ministry of Justice was powering ahead with a £1 billion plan to ‘digitise’ the
Juries, and the right to a fair trial, are under threat from the left. The latest attack came from Ann Coffey, the Labour MP for Stockport, who believes that we should consider abolishing juries in rape cases. A few months ago, the tax barrister Jolyon Maugham QC – no friend of the current Labour leadership,
