Sunday, June 14, 2009

Guilty Until Proven Guilty

It is both reassuring and disappointing to notice that human nature does not change. Our most recent public sensation was hot enough to share the front pages with the latest disgraced Member of Parliament’s outrageous expense claims. As several perceptive commentators have noted, the age of the witch hunt is ever with us and this week’s witch is one Vanessa George, a nursery worker from the original Plymouth in south-west England.

Mrs George qualifies as Demoness of the Week due to allegations that she took pornographic photos of the little children in her care and sexually abused some of them. Apart from the inherent shock value of the alleged offences, the yellow press are plainly lining her up as Myra Hindley Mark 2. But legal quibbles such as “Innocent till proven guilty” can be safely ignored, both by the media and the enraged mob at her court appearance, who spat on her and attacked the van in which she was transported.

Theodore Dalrymple had ample exposure to evil in the course of his career as a prison doctor and described the same mentality among prisoners. Many prisoners considered themselves hard done by and claimed they had been set up or framed by the police or judicial system. But no such benefit of the doubt was extended to those suspected of sexual offences against children. They were instantly guilty if charged and could expect the most ferocious punishment from fellow inmates.

Before rushing to judgement, the press might have remembered the recent fiasco of two nursery workers in Newcastle, at the other end of England. This pair were found to be innocent after years of agony when they had been falsely accused of similar offences. But, hey, what's the problem about destroying the lives of Mrs George, her husband and two teenage daughters when there's so much money to be made?

The intelligent and exceptionally well informed journalist Dominic Lawson recently wrote that the British media have been in mourning since the death of the child killer Myra Hindley in prison in 2002. For the past 40 years, the images of two blond women have been guaranteed to sell newspapers, magazines and TV programs. One is Myra, the other is Princess Diana. Admittedly Diana’s hair colour was natural, while Myra’s came out of a bottle. But her 1960s iconic image of the hard-faced bitch with the blond beehive hairdo is ever enduring and endlessly reproduced. Later pictures of her in prison, with dark hair and a sweet smile, make her look like your favourite aunt and don’t fit the fairy story so well.

Unless you have lived in Britain for the last forty years, you cannot imagine the degree and quality of hatred focused on this woman. The only remotely comparable kind of loathing might be that directed at Adolf Hitler. But even Hitler’s public presentation lacks the peculiarly venomous edge which Hindley’s name instantly provokes. I was with friends on the evening in 2002 when her death was announced on TV and one friend’s vehement and heartfelt comment was “Good!” This friend is a really sweet natured and loving person; she was also born after Hindley’s trial and conviction.

Myra’s crimes were hideous, though not exceptionally horrible by the standards of British murders of both children and adults. I can think of numerous child killings over the last 40 years that were even worse and those perpetrators are almost completely forgotten. The barbaric killing of two French students in London in 2008 made Hindley’s crimes look mild in comparison. Yet I expect the names of their two vile killers to be largely forgotten a few weeks after they begin their 35+ year sentences. But she was caught in a perfect storm of circumstances partly outside her control.

Obviously the serial killing of children excites particular revulsion. And the fact that a woman participated made it doubly heinous, even though she was an accomplice who did not physically kill the children. True, she need not have associated with the depraved Ian Brady or gone along with his murders or assisted in the burial of the bodies. But there were two extra factors which have compounded and extended the infamy of the “Moors Murders” case, as it is known (The bodies were buried in the bleak high moors east of Manchester).

The first was the audio evidence. When she came to court in 1966, even hardened policemen were shaken to the core as tape recorded screams of their tortured 10 year old victim, Lesley Anne Downey, were played back. Reasonably priced tape recording equipment had only recently become available to the general public and Brady had put it to use to record his crimes. As far as I know, it is still the only murder in history where the crime was tape recorded. It helped to seal Brady and Hindley’s conviction and added another level to the public outrage at her crimes. Also the audio evidence had a visceral and immediate impact. No verbal testimony from any number of witnesses or academic pathologists could equal the searing agony of the little girl pleading for mercy and finding none: “Please let me go home to my mummy…..I swear on the Bible, I won’t tell anyone”.

No wonder that her crimes have achieved almost mythical status as examples of ultimate human evil. I say “her” crimes because Hindley is associated forever in most people’s minds as the more evil of the pair. No body wants to hang a woman. But in Hindley’s case nearly everyone would gladly have made an exception. Except that option was no longer legally possible.

Here we have the second complicating factor in her case. The last two people to be executed in England were hung in 1964. The use of the death penalty was suspended for a few years until formal abolition around 1970. As a sop to public sentiment, various officials and politicians promised that “life imprisonment for murder would mean life”. The lying bastards. “Life imprisonment” most usually means 10 years or so before release on licence. In the case of Hindley and Brady, it did turn out to be a life long sentence. She died in prison and he is still inside, probably having slid into insanity by now. So, for the thirty-six years of her imprisonment, much of the public could justly feel that an exceptionally evil killer had cheated the gallows.

The relatives of the victims publicly and repeatedly threatened to kill them if they were released. The politicians and officials responsible for parole thus had an extra nasty dimension to consider, apart from the usual established criteria for releasing a convicted killer back into the community. If Hindley was released (as she should have been freed under the normal rules in the 1990s), she would almost certainly have been killed by vigilantes. No new identity or “secret” address would have survived for 48 hours; a corrupt official would have sold it to the press before she was freed. And if she was killed and her murderers brought to justice, would a British jury convict? You might get another notorious case of a jury approving of murder, as happened in Australia where a vigilante policeman used his service revolver to kill a man he accused of molesting a relative. The victim was dead and couldn’t defend himself in court, but the policeman walked free despite there being no reasonable doubt as to his guilt.

But Hindley was not just a reviled serial killer. She was also a great long term investment from the media viewpoint. She was only in her early 20s when convicted and the reporters knew that they had a wonderful story for decades to come. For the rest of her life she was a guaranteed earner for the British press, who were and are happy to ignore any law or code of ethics in the pursuit of a great story. Any news of Hindley’s life in prison or any hint that she might be soon released were guaranteed front page coverage, along with the understandable but still unappealing chorus of hatred from a group of her victims’ relatives (who I understand were kept on a retainer by at least one tabloid).

Lord Longford, the Catholic campaigner for prison reform, quickly discovered this when he befriended Hindley. Whenever he visited her the press were waiting for him at the prison gate. He had arranged his visits confidentially in advance, so it was plainly a corrupt prison officer who was leaking the information to the newspapers. But despite his protests no one was ever detected or punished. No British politician would ever dare to offend the press barons.

So ever since her demise the newspapers have been looking for a replacement. Most of those who looked like possible candidates have proved to be fifth-rate villainesses and quickly forgotten. Even Vanessa George looks too insubstantial to be a convincing understudy for Hindley. But the search goes on.

The sad wasted life of Myra Hindley contained extra embarassments for Catholics in Britain. Lord Longford always had something of the Holy Fool about his public persona and his long association with Hindley did neither of them any favours. He was convinced that she was a good Catholic girl who had sincerely repented of her crimes and deserved to be released. I could feel only that if she truly understood the nature of her crimes, she would understand that she fully deserved a full life sentence and should accept that with resignation. As a prison visitor, I met another prison visitor who had visited Hindley and gained an utterly different impression of her character and disposition. She declared unequivocally that Hindley was “the most evil person she had ever met”. As this prison visitor was not nationally famous, merely a local volunteer, she had no political influence or powerful friends and was thus of no use to Hindley in lobbying for an early release.

In his article for “The Sunday Times” on 31st May ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6395923.ece ), Dominic Lawson considered the present chaotic shambles which poses as British policy for sentencing criminals of varying degrees of villainy. He quoted effectively from a great Christian thinker who Lord Longford might have been wise to consider before he endorsed Hindley's pleas for clemency:

“The advocates of our system maintain that it is more humane, since it allows for the prisoner who displays penitence to be released much earlier. Sixty years ago CS Lewis demolished this conceit in his essay The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. He pointed out that a sentence based solely and inflexibly on the wickedness perpetrated – the concept of just desert, which was increasingly being denounced as “mere retribution” – was the only way of linking punishment and justice.

By contrast, said Lewis, if sentences served were based on a subjective assessment of the rehabilitative process, “grumpy unrepentant prisoners” could be consigned to perpetual incarceration while those cunning enough to “cheat with success” would be freed.

The dystopia foreseen by CS Lewis is now the English system of justice.”