Criminal Justice
Ronan Bennett
In October 1989 I was in Cuenca in southern Ecuador. Cuenca is a sleepy town, Ecuador – for reasons partly to do with climate and partly with the military’s intermittent but pointed interventions in political and economic life – a sleepy country. Once, during a presidential election, the country briefly came out of its quiescence when one of the candidates exhibited worrying signs of sun-stroke. In a television interview he began to boast about his many personal achievements; by the time he got properly into his stride he was insisting he had a better degree than his opponent, a bigger house, a more beautiful wife, taller children and – definitive proof of his fitness to govern – thicker semen. This was too much, even for Ecuadorians long used to the macho exaggerations of the Latin American stump. The electorate woke up, laughed themselves silly for a week and voted in the candidate of the inferior semen. But this was a rare high point: as a rule, it is a quiet country, a fact reflected in the headline of a newspaper I picked up in Cuenca. For reasons best known to himself, the editor had decided to splash with a story headlined, ‘Nothing Unusual Happened Today’. I remember enjoying the story, though I cannot now recall any of the detail. However, another item caught my attention and has stayed with me since: an agency story datelined Londres to the effect that the Court of Appeal had suddenly and unexpectedly freed the three men and one woman known in Britain as the Guildford Four.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 13 · 8 July 1993
From Christopher Price
I am glad you were able to give Ronan Bennett the necessary space to document the current attempt to reconvict the Guildford Four (LRB, 24 June). As Bennett makes clear, the conspiracy has all along been between judicial and police grandees, on the one hand, and the Conservative press, on the other. I would like to think that at least some of the jurors who acquitted the policemen did so because they did not wish to be parties to the conviction of scapegoats when more Establishment criminals were clearly going free; and because they realised that each and every player in the court was a bit-part actor in the same theatrical production at the end of which British justice was meant to live happily ever after; and that even if they had convicted, the police would have been let off with a little community service and the plot would have scarcely changed.
It is not, however, just the Irish who get verballed and stitched up. The Confait case, in which three South London youngsters were put away for murder in 1973, has uncanny parallels. An official enquiry, after their convictions were quashed, with its suggestion that one was innocent and the others guilty, mirrors the current police innuendo about the guilt of some of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. A Royal Commission on Criminal Justice has been appointed partly as a damage limitation exercise and partly to achieve an increase in police powers. Above all, no public apology, at any time, to those beaten up and convicted. One can see the whole charade happening again later this year with the Runciman Commission equivocal on the right to silence and a similar phoney, softball prosecution of the Birmingham police.
The only glimmer of hope is Sir John May, who has the powers to continue his public enquiry into what really happened at Guildford. If he cops out, as he has been urged to, the script will have been rewritten and the truth finally and officially suppressed.
Christopher Price
Leeds Metropolitan University
Vol. 15 No. 14 · 22 July 1993
From Jeremy James
Ronan Bennett’s article on criminal justice was devastating, not least because it was so understated and dispassionate (LRB, 24 June). Surely the real flaw with English justice lies not with individual policemen, or with any individual for that matter (although whoever marked the bundle of documents in the Guildford Four case ‘not to be seen by the defence’ should have been in the dock), but with the system itself. The older I become, the more I am convinced that what the law, medicine, indeed all the professions need is far more women. In my experience, they are clearer-minded, brisker, and above all less interested in the cosy clubland and endless games-playing of their male colleagues, which sometimes seem more important than the end they are supposed to be pursuing.
Jeremy James
St Julien le Montagnier, France
From Nicholas Young
I was particularly struck by the way Ronan Bennett used his personal experience to analyse and understand his subject. This contrasts with much modern extended reportage (originating, I guess, with John Reed) in which wars, revolutions and the suffering of other people appear as interesting backgrounds in the author’s quest to understand (or just enjoy) himself. Bennett’s refusal to allow his own experience to become his subject is rare and admirable.
Nicholas Young
Save the Children Fund,
Vol. 15 No. 15 · 5 August 1993
From Anne Carson
Ronan Bennett is to be congratulated for a thoroughly impressive piece of journalism, scholarship and self-control (LRB, 24 June). It is not rare nowadays to be moved to shock and anger by a story of inequities in our so-called justice system; what is rare is to be moved beyond shock and anger – to hope – by the scrupulosity with which such a story is told.
Anne Carson
McGill University, Montreal
From David Sandblom
One wonders what sense of moral or political pressure induced you to allocate roughly ten pages to Ronan Bennett’s essay. A good essay would not deserve the space given and this piece, tendentious and obsessive, is not good. While not doubting that malpractice took place I found Bennett’s reasoning and use of evidence as question-begging as the other side’s. I do not have the inclination to enumerate the objections to his case (my principal purpose is to object to the amount of space wasted) but no doubt you have that catalogue from other readers. I hope you will take note of the objections and the distaste for being bored at such inordinate length.
David Sandblom
Gweru, Zimbabwe
