Finally somebody is standing up to this Government.
The Law Society have launched a judicial review into the Government’s decision to limit costs recoverable by an acquitted defendant in criminal cases to legal aid rates, on the grounds that they are using their power for an improper purpose.
Let us be clear exactly what this means.
You are accused by the Crown Prosecution Service of a crime which you are sure you didn’t commit.
You ask your solicitor to defend you. If your solicitor is any good whatsoever, he will be charging you three or four times the rate of legal aid.
You are found to be innocent of the charge. The Government will be required to repay you only the amount you would have spent on legal aid – not the full cost of your defence. Leaving you considerably out of pocket.
This has echoes of the fiasco which is compensation for the Crown having wrongly imprisoned you on a charge which is later overturned. The delightful (???) Robin Tam QC, instructed by the Treasury Solicitor, successfully persuaded the Court of Appeal that the amount of compensation you should receive for loss of earnings whilst wrongly imprisoned should be paid to you less the cost of your porridge and rock hard prison mattress, on the grounds that had you not been in prison, you would have had to provide same for yourself! How do these people sleep at night?
The Government expect to save up to £25 Million pounds a year as a result of forcing people to pay for their own defence even when innocent.
This will go some way towards recouping Gordon’s generosity towards the Climategate fiasco by giving away £1.5 Billion of EU money to reduce global warming, the benefits of which we are already seeing as Europe grinds to a halt in the big freeze.
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Coming soon: Government plans to jail innocent victims of mugging. This is expected to save the Justice Department £14.2 million of the present cost of tracking down the guilty muggers since the victims have already presented themselves to the authorities.
STOP PRESS: Government is to fund a £14.2 million outreach project to train Taliban fighters in the use of effective road side bombs thus ensuring their future employment and economic stability in Afghanistan. This will be funded by savings made in the Justice Department.
h/t Tim Worstall
{ 5 comments }
Yes, I did spot this: sometimes, a subscription to The Lawyer comes in useful.
I’ve no idea what one does with people who think like this: either they’re so mad as to be pitied, or so stupid as to be put down…or so despicably mean as to be Civil Servants.
For lest we forget, these are the folks who put a spending cap on the CPS, telling them that only ‘high profile’ cases were worth the £10,000 a pop required to convict criminals.
They must know how they’re destroying civilisation…mustn’t they? And if they do – as they now go about their work (see today’s press) of amalgamating police forces and cutting their budgets further still – then are there not bonfires and lamp-posts awaiting them one day?
One can only hope so.
YM x
Yeah, right, a lawyer standing up to the government; very funny.
There isn’t a lawyer in the land that would stand up against the government on my behalf. Not that I have the funds to do so. Even though I can prove everything I have said, I have no means of getting a resolution through legal means.
“Government plans to jail innocent victims of mugging”
It’s my contention that this has been happening for some years already. The population has been mugged in more ways than one for a very long time. If somebody wants to argue with me about us living in a neo-fascist state then perhaps they could start by explaining the above action. They can’t! We are all criminals.
Some 20+ years a go my Swiss brother-in-law was jailed for refusing to serve the army, which is an offense next to high treason. And he had to PAY for board and lodging!
Perhaps Our Learned Friends are charging three or four times too much? The Law Society is another closed shop trade union for the professional classes, like the BMA.
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