The Defence Brief

Winston Blackmore with some of his children and grandchildren There is a trial ongoing in the Canadian province of British Columbia that raises some interesting questions about sexual freedoms in our liberal 21 st century society. It’s the trial of Messrs Blackmore and Oler who between them have 28 wives; Mr Blackmore has the lions share having amassed 24 of the wives and having sired an impressive 145 children – I bet he can’t remember all their names. Both men have been members of the Bountiful community, which is a religious sect that has been on the Mounties list of people to prosecute for a quarter of a century now. Both men have previously been tried on charges of bringing young teenage girls across the border to marry sect leader Warren Jeffs. Blackmore and one of his wives were convicted while Oler was acquitted. While the previous trial involved child brides there is no suggestion in the current trial that the women to whom Blackmore and Oler are married are ...

This is not how it happens in England and Wales Following the Ched Evans verdict, you can read my analysis of the case here , the hysteria continues completely unabated by anything so unhelpful as facts and reality - please read the post above that was taken from Twitter. Today, I read outrage on Twitter at how women jurors are abused by the courts who require them to answer person questions about being assaulted by men in open court prior to being allowed to sit on a jury. As I said in my post on the Ched Evans case, it is this sort of uninformed nonsense that will put people off reporting crimes not the reality, because the reality is that this sort of thing simply does not happen in the UK, despite claims by some on Twitter. Blame the judges Let’s look at the claim quickly. First, we see it’s posted by somebody called “Shawna Gore” – sounds like an American name to me and sure enough a very quick search on Facebook reveals that this person works in Miami....

Ched Evans Before I begin, I will say that at around 4,500 words this is probably the longest blog I’ve ever posted but I think it’s all necessary to set the scene for this case and explain the background that has been largely ignored or airbrushed in the press. Despite its length, I have not attempted to include every little detail of either fact or law but have done my best to provide a balanced picture of the Ched Evans case, what happened and why the courts reached the decisions they did. There has been so much written about the Ched Evans case over the past weekend, much of it based on a very shaky grasp of the facts and law, that I decided I would read up about the case and weigh in (hopefully on a slightly firmer footing than most of the articles I’ve read so far). Broadly speaking there seem to be three groups who have opinions on the case: 1.        Sexual violence groups (including people describing themselves as “radical feminists”...

Notts police encourage women to report non-crimes for investigation You may recall that a couple of months ago the new Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police announced that she would be encouragingwomen to report acts of misogyny to the police for investigation , regardless of whether the actions being reported were actual crimes or not. The force, which is dealing with a £54M budget cut, has axed its city division and is expected to cut 400 police officers from its ranks over the next three-years, has trained some police officers to deal with investigations into allegations of misogyny. I’m not a detective but I’m unclear exactly how you investigate a misogynistic assault differently from a regular assault – maybe you can enlighten me on the differences in evidence likely to be found in the two situations? This successful policy has seen twenty investigations launched, which resulted in two arrests – both for offences that would have been investigated (or should ...