Just when life seemed to be getting simpler, yesterday we attended a very special private screening of this rather abstract trailer. Look, you can see its li’l brain.
ETA: mid February 2009.
Current emotion: scared and elated.
To escape justice you make a deal. This is how the system works. The police arrest the easy target, shake them up, inject the fear, and slap on the meanest charges they can dream up. The idea is that then the guilty party (for all suspects are guilty) will save their own skins by testifying against the next perp up the chain, the bigger fish. This, I presume, was the reason for their preposterous charges; the more life damaging their threat, the greater their bargaining power.
I’m sure this method works quite effectively when they get the right target but, unfortunately, it fails dramatically if the suspect you have bought in really isn’t guilty. I didn’t know anyone relating to their investigation. I didn’t recognise any of the names they tried me with. I didn’t have anyone I could offer up, or any information that might help them. I didn’t know shit about shit, which meant I had nothing I could make a deal with. For me there was no way out of the charges apart from seeing them through to the end and answering to them in front of a jury.
The courts offer a similar guilt-incentive scheme. If you put in a guilty plea at the earliest opportunity (the case management hearing) you are awarded maximum “credit”, which means a reduced sentence. You get the opportunity to change your plea to guilty at various other points along the way, with diminishing credit, reducing to zero if it comes to the jury having to make the decision. Which is nice to know if you believe you are guilty of the crime you stand accused of. But if you are innocent, or worse if you don’t know (for who can really know), there is no similar way out. Anyone not guilty has to endure the maximum length of the procedure. In my case, two years strapped to my ticking time-bomb.
There is no bonus if you insisted, correctly, that you were innocent from the start. You don’t receive any increase in compensation, because there isn’t any compensation. When you are found not-guilty you can’t even expect an apology. Perhaps because such a weak gesture might only serve to highlight the impossibility of undoing the damage.
Lesson learned No 6 – justice takes time
For those two years we lived in limbo. Having the very real possibility of my being sent to prison at any time, and at very short notice, we lived without a future. Like a terminal illness, the threat overshadowed everything we did, and there was never any end in site. When the trial finally happened the overarching emotion we shared was a relief that it was going to be over one way or the other. The fear of going to prison was secondary by then.
Before my arrest we had plans. We wanted a second child, but now we couldn’t be sure whether our first child would have a father this time next month. We wanted to move house, but suddenly we didn’t know if there would be anyone to pay the mortgage. Financial institutions wouldn’t deal with us because I had a “pending” criminal conviction. The concept of innocent until proven guilty is clearly not applicable to the world of commerce.
I couldn’t move job, because my irregular absences for hearings and meetings with lawyers would need to be explained. To weather a lengthy court case one needs an employer who can cope with an employee who might have to take a number of weeks leave on less than a days notice. We couldn’t even book a holiday until the trial was over, at a time when we really could have done with one. For certain periods you have to be available for court if they find a slot, and have to attend given 24 hours notice. You can’t book the time off work for it, because most of the time it just doesn’t happen. I don’t think I’m peculiar in having never had a job where I was so disposable dropping everything on a day’s notice could be accommodated. As you might expect, this caused considerable stress at work, as I went from valuable revenue earner to costly liability overnight.
Of course if were to be sent to jail none of this would matter, because I would simply lose it all. My child, who needs me as much as I need him, would have no father. I would lose my job, which would mean I would lose the house. I would likely lose my lady too, not just because I could no longer keep her in shoes, but because I would have made a pretty poor prospect as a husband and father.
While I waited in limbo, the police, I presume, were hoping they’d get Dante. Then they would have been able to use me against him. It was in their interest to prolong the process as long as they could; to keep my possessions, to keep the threat of prison hanging over me, to keep me in fear; to ensure my co-operation. But they never arrested him. They still haven’t.
For the process to go the full duration meant that everyone lost out. The police lost their bargaining chip, while I lost two years of my life. If they were to arrest Dante now there would be nothing to compel me to testify against my friend, and plenty to encourage my uncooperation. The only person who has gained from this really, in Mr Dante. Wherever he may be.
Dante, if you’re reading, get in touch. You owe me a number of beers.
When you receive a visit for the police there are two ways you can deal with it. Firstly, there is the guilty way, in which you treat the police with suspicion, you are as uncooperative as you can be, and you give them no information until you have spoken to a lawyer. Naturally by doing this you are implying your own guilt, and are asking for a rough ride.
Alternatively there is the innocent way, in which you treat the police as valuable public servants, help them as far as you can, and try to make their job easier. This way you are a good citizen, your courtesy will be reciprocated and you can hold your head high throughout.
Unfortunately, this is rubbish. The correct approach, the only approach, is the first option. Irrespective of whether you have done anything wrong, whether you are perpetrator, victim or bystander, the first way is the only way. Police procedure doesn’t delineate by vague moral concepts like ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’; that is for the courts to decide. The police only see the potential for a conviction, which is quite a different matter. If they are knocking on your door this is all they are looking for.
I made the mistake of thinking I didn’t need a lawyer. I hadn’t, after all, done anything wrong (so I thought) and waiting for a lawyer would only slow the process down (so they said). Take it from me, even if you are Mother Theresa, you need a lawyer. Never speak to the police without a lawyer. Don’t risk it.
If there is a moral to this story, it’s not a good one. The lesson is not to steer clear of criminal activity, nor to choose your friends with care, because it was neither of these that created our situation. I acted morally and honestly both with Dante and later the police. Nor is the justice system at fault here. I was innocent of any crime, and the right decision was made when the process finally reached the court two years later. The problem, the only problem, was with the police. Their actions during those two years were not in the interests of justice. Their attitude was to assume, quite wrongly, that I was guilty of something, they weren’t sure what, but of something. And it was this unjust, but purely procedural, victimisation that caused all the damage. The moral, worrying though it is, is fear your police.
If I found myself in the same situation again, the only thing I would do differently would be to not assist the police in any way. I discovered, the hard way, that there are no rewards for ‘helping police with their enquiries’, and the consequences can be horrific.
Lesson learned no#4 - The police don’t want a safe community. They want a scared community.
The police only have one weapon they are free to use on ’suspects’ without legal constraint - intimidation. And they use it as excessively and irresponsibly as a child with a chocolate fountain. In truth I had little choice in assisting the police because if I had refused to co-operate I would have been kept in custody until I did and taken away from my 6 month old child. This is what they threatened. If I refused to co-operate perhaps they’d have more success if they bought in my girlfriend instead. I could go home right now if I was happy for that to happen. Whether they had the rights to do any of this I don’t know, but these where the threats they used.
What I did wrong, the only thing I did wrong, was to be helpful. They arrested me because I told them I had handled Dante’s money. He had left a large sum with me, many, many years ago, long before there was anything associating him with drugs, back when he was just a hippy without a bank account. Naturally I hadn’t touched his money, just kept it safe, and had pretty much forgotten about it. But telling the police this meant they “had” to arrest me. They said it as if it was just tedious procedure that they had to comply with. The reason why I then had to be arrested under suspicion of “money laundering”, “supply of cocaine” and “supply of cannabis” were less clear, but this was what they did.
Lesson learned no#5 - Nice guys finish last.
And so began the expensive, unjust, traumatic farce. According to them, they had a case on Dante wrapped up and they just needed my help to bring him in and conclude the investigation. In truth they didn’t even know his name. They said I would just be helping finish this job, and by helping them it would put an end to the nightmare as quickly as possible. The reality was that this was just a fishing expedition, trying to associate someone, anyone, with a stash of drugs and money they had found and to try and get a conviction of some sort, preferably with as little effort as possible.
In my attempts to help the police and end the matter as swiftly as possible and get back to my worried family, I offered information freely. While I have never been stupid enough to sell drugs, launder money, fiddle my tax or get a speeding fine, I was naive enough to believe that talking to the police without a lawyer would help speed up the process. It did the opposite.
I was interrogated at length, and they succeeded in ‘breaking’ me. At some point in the first three-hour interview, I mentioned having given my friend a lift on occasion. Immediately following this I stood accused of being his ‘driver’. By having a bank balance in the black I was the ‘money man’. Retrospectively, in the course of that first interview, it was apparent they thought perhaps they could cast me as the ‘brains’ behind a major drugs operation, and if they could crack me I’d give up everyone else involved. Unfortunately, they had the wrong guy.
Regardless though, by being the most co-operative, polite and helpful person they had met that evening, I offered myself as the easiest target for conviction. My only way out was to make a deal.
Nemesis The Warlock - Pat Mills / Kevin O’Neill (2000AD Prog 520 - April 1987)
Every so often I catch a talk radio show on the civil liberty infringement du jour, and on these programmes you can always rely on at least one caller who feels compelled to phone-in the opinion “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear from CCTV / ID Cards / DNA databases / Blunkett / Judgment Day etc…”. While I have to admire this sunny-minded, Panglossian faith in one’s masters, these people are just naïve idiots. Upon these Big Brother apologists I just find myself wishing horrible things. Please, ironic fate, bestow upon them a false accusation, something juicy – child porn, terrorism, money laundering perhaps, and allow them the joy of the subsequent visit with search warrants. Then see how this might change their opinion of state powers and civil rights.
Lesson learned No 2 – There is no such thing as “innocent until proven guilty”.
The first thing they took were my computers. They said I would have them back “soon”, which turned out to mean two years later. Because of what I do for a living, I had to replace them immediately, at great expense (the cost of which is up to the accused to foot apparently). And to be really irritating, not only did they take my computers, they also took all my peripherals, cables, thingummies and doo-dads, so I had to replace all of those too. They took these items not because they thought they might have relevance to their investigation, but because they didn’t know what they were. If in doubt, impound it. Even after politely telling them that were unlikely to find incriminating data on a router, a monitor, or a CD copy of PhotoShop, I still wasn’t allowed them back. A few hundred quids worth of letters from my lawyer; might as well have been talking to a wall.
They took all my software, which meant my only option was to source pirate copies of software I’d legally paid for. They also took all my back-up discs, without which I had no access to my previous 6 years of work, which made things difficult. They took my address book so I lost everyone’s phone numbers, a stack of unopened mail which I would get the chance to respond to two years later, all my photos, and the contents of my filing cabinet, including all my invoices and tax information, which became the start of a two year battle with a not-so-understanding tax office as to why I couldn’t file a tax return.
Between my computers and discs they had every byte of data I had generated or stored in the last 15 years. They had data going back to when I was young and stupid and probably were doing illegal things and probably bragging to my mates about them in writing too. They had email arguments with my loved ones, juvenilia, god-awful attempts at fiction and lyrics, unpublished rants about the state of the nation, and jpgs of me and my wife in the kind of situations you might only capture when drunk with a digital camera. And in my imagination they had much worse than this, as I didn’t remember what I had stored, I had never needed to. I was a paranoid wreck, wondering what they were looking at, what they were looking for and what they might find by accident.
They also announced they would be enquiring of search engine records to get a list of everything I had ever googled, to see if that turned up anything interesting. Which it’s very likely it would. Would you remember everything you had ever googled? Would there be anything in that deep well of data perhaps that could be used to misrepresent you, if someone so chose?
Lesson learned No 3 – If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve everything to fear.
Obviously, had I known this was going to happen I would have protected my privacy a little better. As would a guilty party, someone who had got something to hide. But like the idiot caller to the radio show, I considered myself an “innocent”, and never expected there’d be a day when my possessions would be simply taken from me, because an authority figure had decided to make me a target.
Because this is what that caller doesn’t appreciate: we live in a system designed to ensure that we are all guilty of something. The law is a mess of unenforceable, illogical statutes, which only come into play when you are looking for something to convict someone of. Take copyright law as an example; in the digital age, with the ease of data reproduction, it is difficult not to infringe copyright, be it unintentional or not. If you were forced to prove your legal right to every mp3 or jpg on your hard-drive, would you be able to? And this would be the least of offences you could be charged with. Under our “prevention of terrorism” laws you can be detained simply on a misunderstood search term. And, speaking from experience, misunderstanding is something the police excel at.
This is why there is no such thing as innocent until proven guilty, because there is no such thing as innocent. Whether by intention or by accident, we are all criminals just waiting to be found out. For this reason, you do have something to be afraid of, whether you’ve done something wrong or not. We should fear our state, and oppose its power at every opportunity, not apologise for it.
After two years of impotent paranoia, it turned out none of what the police took had any relevance to their case, and nothing from the possessions impounded was referred to in court. They had simply sat on it all for two years, the majority of it hadn’t even been taken out of the sealed evidence bags it arrived in. Apart from the computers, which, rather than just leave sitting there while they halved in value, they took apart and then returned to me broken. The kind of service our tax money pays for.
For two years I was sat upon a ticking time bomb. An inscrutable device, whose workings I couldn’t understand, but which threatened to blow my life apart were it to go off. It didn’t go off, it was eventually safely defused, which is why I am here to talk about it, but for the time it was ticking it added fear and uncertainty to every part of my life.
In February 2006, when the pigs came knocking, I had a job I liked, with a decent wage, a house in the ‘burbs that I could just about afford, a beautiful lady who said she loved me (when she was drunk), and the most gorgeous 7 month old baby boy who worshiped his dad almost as much as I worshiped him. I stood to lose all of these if the efforts of Sussex Police were to achieve their aims. The three charges they bought against me – supply of cocaine, supply of cannabis and money laundering - all carried a minimum of a custodial sentence. I was facing prison if I were to be found guilty of even one of the three charges.
The fact that I was innocent of all three was of little consequence, it only made it more confounding. My arrest had seemed ludicrous, and being charged with these three offences four months later made even less sense. I went into a period of shock following both these occasions and was signed off work for a number of weeks. My head was spun. My baby was in his first year, so it had been a long time since anyone in our house had slept for longer than three hours at a time, so our mental states were already quite delicate. Following my arrest I really didn’t know what was going on. Surely, a publicly funded organisation wouldn’t start an expensive criminal proceeding if they didn’t think they had a chance of winning it? Did they know something I didn’t? If they did, they weren’t telling me.
Lesson learned no#1 - The law is not interested in right or wrong, only results.
When the police came knocking on my door that Saturday teatime, they weren’t looking for me. They were looking for a friend of mine. To protect his identity let’s call him Dante. Dante had got himself involved in some dodgy dealings; drugs, money and cars. But I hadn’t seen him in a long time so I didn’t know where he was. I still don’t, and neither do the police. Even after two years reportedly chasing someone who (we now know) hasn’t gone far, they have scored a big fat nada. But perhaps this is because they weren’t actually trying too hard. Rather than expend their efforts trying to catch someone who didn’t want to be caught, they had a much easier target. A target who wasn’t going anywhere, because he had a job and a family and a bus to catch every morning. Even if I had only the most tenuous of connections to this bundle of drugs and money the pigs had lucked across, perhaps they could build something from it.
It became clear that, rather than attempt to catch a possible drug dealer, Sussex Police were instead going to try their best to bang up an innocent associate of his. Just because they could. Whether I was guilty or innocent, moral or immoral, a good or a bad person didn’t matter. It was only about what they could manage to make for the minimum amount of effort.
Obviously, the resources spent trying to prosecute me (the total cost of which runs into the tens of thousands of pounds) would have been much better employed in activities such as solving crimes, serving the community, or making our streets a safer place. But this is not how the system works. The only measure of success to a Police Officer is their conviction rate, so this is all they focus on. In the choice between a criminal who runs, and an innocent who doesn’t, the easiest conviction is usually with the innocent. Because, even picking someone entirely at random, if you were to examine their lives closely enough, or put them under enough pressure, you are bound to find they are guilty of something. And this just might give you something to work with.
to be continued …
The F-word, in the right context (or more accurately, the wrong context), can be comedy gold. But use it in a GCSE exam paper and it is worth two marks out of possible 27. This is the guideline set by chief examiner Peter Buckroyd.
The exam was GCSE English, the question was “Describe the room you are sitting in”. The answer given was “Fuck off”.
To gain minimum marks in English, students must demonstrate “some simple sequencing of ideas” and “some words in appropriate order”. The phrase had achieved this, according to Mr Buckroyd.
The chief examiner, who is responsible for standards in exams taken by 780,000 candidates and for training for 3,000 examiners, told The Times: “It would be wicked to give it zero, because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for – like conveying some meaning and some spelling.
“It’s better than someone that doesn’t write anything at all. It shows more skills than somebody who leaves the page blank.”
…
“If it had had an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more because it would have been showing a little bit of skill,” Mr Buckroyd said.
(thanks to Cultural Snow)
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