Goodbye – That’s All She Wrote

Inside Time often publishes scoops on the Criminal Justice system in Britain, but today I have got the biggest ever. I can exclusively reveal the resignation of one of the best known and most admired figures in the legal world, revered in this country and internationally, but now astonishingly quitting her role here in Britain. Lady Justice herself has handed in her notice, and below I publish her letter in full. We have all seen her, standing on top of the Old Bailey with her sword in one hand and scales in the other, fighting for truth and balancing all the evidence, but finally she has packed her bags and is off. It will send shockwaves through all those who care about this country and our reputation for fairness, and might also concern one or two members of the Government as well though I have no evidence of that. Enough from me, here is her resignation statement.

Dear Mr Raab

I am sending this letter to the Deputy Prime Minister, to the Justice Secretary, and to the Lord Chancellor, as I am not sure in which guise you will be appearing today. It is with much sadness I resign my post as the epitome of Justice in Britain with immediate effect, and shall leave my plinth above the Old Bailey just as soon as I can arrange a Crane to lift me down. Whilst I say with sadness, I unfortunately cannot say with regret, because I have been forced into taking this action by you and your seeming failure to understand and value your proper roles

I have stood here for 120 years now, and as in the slightly xenophobic but rather amusing little football chant, that has been through two world wars and one world cup. That period of over a century is just a brief moment in my active life, because I started work in 2400 BC in Egypt, when you in Britain were still sitting around starkers painting yourselves with Woad, then moved through Greece to Rome where I was first named Justitia by Augustus, and travelled here with the Romans. For centuries I did not have much of an impact as there was not much justice, certainly for the poor.

Still things were looking better around the beginning of the 20^th Century and so I was happy to accept this important job of overseeing, from quite a height, all that went on in your most important criminal court whilst at the same time shooing away pigeons whose intentions were not at all pleasant. Through history I have wept at some dreadful miscarriages of justice. Timothy Evans, convicted of murder in January 1950, executed just two months later, all on the evidence of his neighbour John Christie who was found to be a serial killer and hung two years later for the very crimes of which Evans was wrongly accused. Even so it took decades for the system to admit they were wrong on Evans. It was only in 2004 that the Criminal Cases Review Commission reluctantly said he probably was innocent but did not quash his conviction as it was a bit like hard work to do so. If you get something so badly wrong, for goodness’ sake own up and put it right.

Craig and Bentley is another case that nearly pushed me off the roof, with Derek Bentley hung even though it was agreed he did not fire the gun that killed police officer Sidney Miles but the system wanted someone to be put to death, and as his partner Christopher Craig who had fired the gun was too young, Bentley was executed to discourage others. Very wrong indeed. By the way, Bentley was found guilty under joint enterprise and yet, despite this having been adjudged as being wrongly interpreted by the courts, you and your predecessors have totally failed to arrange appeals for all those wrongly convicted for that. Thank goodness you abolished capital punishment or the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six would also have been killed because the system that wrongly convicted them took years to overturn the verdicts and set them free. They too were victims of the desire to punish someone to please the public. That is not what it should be about.

So, if you are bothered about my heartbreak, you may wonder why this is the time I am packing my bags and going. The answer is because of you; your pronouncements on abolishing and replacing the Human Rights Act, and on having a form of veto on Parole Board decisions to release high profile prisoners. Over the past few years, successive governments have announced they are going to rewrite the Human Rights Act because they keep screwing up cases in court by trying to break their own laws in matters such as deportations and the media moan. The Human Rights Act is something you should be proud of, after all you worked for Liberty for a while. But rather than standing there and saying we gave this to the world you would rather grovel to the murky depths of the press and say you will scrap it and replace it with our own version purely to feed the hungry populist monster.

But it is the right of veto over parole that really gets up my bronze nose. First of all, what you are trying to do is make it more difficult for “infamous” people, in prison for headline grabbing crimes, to get out on licence when their time comes. Parole Boards have a clear role to protect the public, but in the cases that everyone jumps up and down about it is not the danger to the public that is the concern but the original crime and notoriety of the prisoner, despite the fact that their sentence was set by the Trial Judge in accordance to guidelines at the time and confirmed later by higher courts. You seem to want to stuff Parole Boards with people inclined to keep others locked up, and frankly whilst Boards have made mistakes in the past, of course they have, they have been controlled by licence conditions. Plus this. What about those suffering Imprisonment for Public Protection, way over their tariffs, whose mental health has been impacted by the despair of their status? Are you going to keep them in to “protect the public” because of concerns over their mental health whilst this group whose health you are harming get worse and worse due to being robbed by you of hope? Are you not responsible for a crime against them by this cruel treatment which you do nothing to solve? Have you the courage to smash this vicious circle? I am sorry to say I very much doubt it.

This is in addition to other stuff going on. Criminalising demonstrations for being noisy. Shipping asylum seekers off to some far distant place, Rwanda has been mentioned, so having fled horror back home we add the trauma of flying them thousands of miles to a strange land because our system cannot cope with processing them and bigots complain. Stripping people of their citizenship because it is easier than giving them a proper trial. Cutting the funds of one national broadcasting TV station and selling off another because you want to suppress criticism. Doesn’t this direction of travel remind you of the actions of countries far away about whom we have been reading and whose systems you are the first to criticise? We should not be moving towards them. What breaks my heart is that you have some good points. You seem genuinely eager to provide work opportunities for people when leaving prison. You do appear to have a vision of how prison should be and what it should be doing, even if you are not that far down the road to delivering it nor do you have much of an idea how it will be achieved in the bulk of the outdated prison estate.  You are clearly aware of what is needed, and that is particularly frustrating.

The role of the courts and parliament are separated for very good reasons, so that fair decisions can be taken by people who do not rely on making themselves popular to get elected. True leaders actually lead, they do not follow the mob or in this case the media who guide the mob. All too often you do. Yours is a vital job, but you are blown in the wind and I am not prepared to stand up here blown in a cold east wind day after day whilst you float in the general direction of repression as desired by certain press barons. You are good and bad, like Jekyll and Hyde, but Jekyll is too often in hiding. So, I quit. Slowly year after year despite disappointments and injustices I have felt things were moving the right way, but I have not got that sense any more. Day by day in every way it gets worse and worse so if you won’t change, I am not staying here to give it a false veneer.

I do not know if you are aware, but in most places my sisters, the Justice family, are all shown with blindfolds on their statues. I uniquely do not, and the reason is that 120 years ago it was considered in Britain that being a woman I was by my very nature impartial and did not need to have my eyes covered to reach a fair decision. Given the actions of so many women over so many years I think that was a bit of a wrong presumption but in my personal case, in most things I certainly am. But in my view of the direction you are taking, I most certainly am not. You are going the wrong way down what should be a one way street, so turn around and start getting it right in future. So now, goodbye. And that is all.

From your former statue, Justice (Lady)