And throw away the key. I despise these paedo vigilante arseholes. Self appointed, self-righteous and criminal.
An innocent couple were wrongly targeted by paedophile hunters and forced to flee their home after angry mob of 300 vigilantes descended on their property.
Fireworks and bricks were launched at the windows of David McLean’s home in Dumbarton, after an angry crowd gathered outside because a social media post wrongly branded him a paedophile.
The people responsible need to be prosecuted for this. I find it disturbing that the police sometimes work with these shits. There is a process for investigating and prosecuting crimes for a reason – so as not to send the wrong people to jail. So as not to have precisely this kind of event. Frankly, the paedo hunter vigilantes are worse than the nonces they are hunting. There needs to be some serious jail time for what happened here pour encourager les autres.
Animals, not civilised people. Who needs the rule of law when you have those who are totally certain that they are right?
I can’t say I blame them, to be honest. We’ve seen in Rotherham, Keighley, Halifax, Telford and numerous other places that the police and Social Services, far from prosecuting paedophiles, will actually aid and abet them. That people have lost confidence in the forces of law and order isn’t a surprise.
I blame them. Absolutely, I blame them. Paedo hunters will happily publish false information on social media as they don’t follow any process, nor exercise due diligence. They do it for clicks, and the hard of thinking, self righteous morons who take what they say as gospel don’t bother to check for themselves that the person they are persecuting might not be the guilty party. No, I have no empathy with these scumbags whatsoever. They need to rot in jail. The failure on the part of the authorities to tackle the grooming gangs is not an excuse.
Newspapers too, recall the eccentric landlord that was identified as a suspect in the murder of one of his tenants, turned out to be a fellow resident in the same building.
Innocent until otherwise proven was the way but once your name is associated with such activity I suspect its difficult to recover.
I hope the false accusers can be identified and face the music themselves.
IIRC it was this case that caused a change in the rules that the police follow so that suspects are named only after they’ve been charged. However as an unintended consequence, not naming suspects or those who are ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ has given a space for speculation, not all of it accurate. Back in 2020 I had people swearing to me that they had ‘inside information’ that the killer of a young girl was a Somali migrant, information I ignored as I could not verify it. It turned out that it wasn’t a Somali it was a mentally ill Albanian who had been refused leave to remain here but stayed anyway. A lot of people ended up with egg on their faces over that one, see https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2020/05/21/a-response-to-a-murder-case-that-will-leave-lot-of-egg-on-a-lot-of-faces/
The problem with vigilantism is that too often the vigilantes end up going after the wrong person as in this case from 2012 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-17547377
I’m less bothered about those groups that fish for nonces and then hand the details over to the police as at least these allegations will hopefull be ended up being tested in court. But those groups that completley ignore the legal process and go after the nonces or alleged nonces themselves are a problem and it’s a problem that will get worse as public trust in the police and criminal justice system sinks even lower than it is now
The problem is that they plaster it over social media, undermining a fair trial.
Those who do that do indeed endanger trials, those who hand details to the police and only go public after a conviction are another matter.
As an aside this is a big difference between the UK and US legal systems. The US, in many states, allows almost complete transparency when it comes to reporting extending to journalistic commentary on cases. That sort of behaviour would see a reporter gaoled in the UK. I have wondered whether the USA trusts its jurors more than the UK trusts our jurors as US jurors are far less shielded from publicity about cases than UK ones are.
I do wonder whether trusting jurors more in the UK and reducing the strictness of the Contempt of Court Acts would stop a lot of the ‘the judge must be a nonce’ comments that come out whenever there is an Islamic Rape Gang case when there are so many defendants that the trial needs to be split into three or more separate trials which necessitates reporting restrictions until the last trial is completed.
I dunno. Do you think the cops involved with the death of Saint George Floyd got a fair trial? That’s an extreme example, but keeping the jurors from seeing or hearing the evidence until it is before them in the courtroom at least attempts to avoid tainting their impressions beforehand. I think, on balance, I prefer our system.
Innocent until Twittered guilty.
LR both systems have their merits and demerits. I can see your point about having juries untainted by prior knowledge but this is a situation much more difficult to achieve today with so much access to news and comment than it was in the past when cities had maybe one or two local newspapers and the national print press was more important than it is today.
Maybe one way, in the UK, that things could be improved (and reduce the amount of ignorant speculation) would be to de-fang the Contempt of Court Act but as a balance bring back the concept of defence counsel being able to make challenges to potential jury members so that those who have been tainted can be excluded from a jury?
It’s a constant battle to preserve the idea that justice must be seen to be done whilst protecting the right to a fair trial.
I completely agree. And everytime you say so in comments or whatever, the stock response is, “So you must be a peado then”. It’s very predicatable
I’ve had similar comment from idiots when explaining why there are reporting restrictions such as in the grooming gang trials where there are large numbers of defendants which require the case to be split into separate trials.
There’s a lot of stuff in any trial that cannot be reported until the trial is over such as where there is legal argument and there is no jury present to hear this. As these are matters of law rather than fact the jury is often excluded from such legal argument. Some of this stuff, if legally reportable, can make for interesting background material for publication when a case has concluded.
Because I’ve worked as a court reporter my instincts are to ‘report everything’ as it’s likely to be in the public interest but there are some transparency moves that have made things worse rather than better. A good example of this is in the reporting of rape trials. It used to be the case that both defendant and accuser both had anonymity which meant that men falsely accused of rape didn’t get their names dragged through the press and the mud when they were found not guilty. After the reforms however there was an unbalanced situation where the accuser of an innocent man kept her anonymity but the accused had their details emblazoned everywhere and not everyone was aware that the man had been found not guilty.
There’s a shocking lack of knowledge among the general public when it comes to the law and its workings and this can make some people prey to charlatans. There’s a really tragic story of some families who lost their children in a horrific accident caused by a migrant who as far as I can ascertain was a Hindu. They got mixed up with those on the fringes of the Tommy Robinson crowd who managed to convince at least one family that a) that the killer driver was a Muslim and the state was hiding this fact and b) that the UK court system was irrevocably bent and they ended up, in desperation, putting their trust in ‘freeman on the land’ types and pseudolaw grifters.
These idiots really believe this claptrap. I suppose they have some comedic value, but that’s about it.
The families of the dead teenagers who got sucked into the pseudolaw stuff are quite frankly victims here. They’ve been mercilessly exploited by grifters into believing that this accident was a terror attack when there is zero evidence to show that. I was not surprised to see that they ended up being co-opted by the laughable UK Yellow Vest group a group that comprised all manner of loons including supporters of dangerous quack cure fraudsters, Zionist plot fanatics and those who believe that the world is run by an elite from a mailbox in London’s Finchley Road. See here: https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2019/02/14/another-british-yellow-vest-washout/ and here: https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2019/08/20/the-london-yellow-vests-completely-implode/