Judge judged. Question: who passed savage sentences on peaceful M25 protesters?
Answer: the same judge who felt a rogue cop should be spared jail
Judges, like football managers, are assessed on results.
If Judge Christopher Hehir, who jailed non-violent Just Stop oil protesters for four and five years for blocking a motorway, erred always on the side of severity, perhaps we would have had less cause for complaint or at least surprise.
But in stark contrast to the terms he used to justify his vindictively disproportionate sentencing of five climate change protesters, Judge Hehir turns out to have a heart, an ability to show Shakespeare’s “quality of mercy”.
Photo Just Stop Oil
It may be that there are many cases in this judge’s record that highlight an alarming degree of inconsistency.
Let us just consider this extraordinary comparison:
In 2015, with a colleague, now deceased, a policeman I shall call L offered to take a woman home in their patrol car from an “incident” in Chesterfield. The woman was drunk, easy prey for a certain kind of man. She had sex with the other officer and performed a sex act on L.
The other officer died of cancer before the case could come to trial but had admitted 13 charges of misconduct in public office relating to sexual conduct with a number of women.
During L's sentencing at Southwark Crown Court, the same court where he would gleefully throw the book at Just Stop Oil irritants, Judge Hehir said his actions amounted to a "very grave betrayal of trust" and had left the woman "humiliated". Too true. But not sufficiently to warrant imprisonment. He did not want to send L to jail but would "bring this sad and sorry tale to its end with a final act of mercy".
I am not a great fan of the relatively recent policy of allowing the Solicitor General to ask the Court of Appeal to increase a sentence deemed unduly lenient, especially when a non-custodial sentence becomes custodial. I am also not a fan of nasty criminals. But it does seem, to my liberal sensibilities, cruel to incarcerate an individual who many months earlier has been given a suspended or otherwise non-custodial sentence by a judge who has heard every detail of the offence/s and any mitigation.
Yet it came as no surprise when the Court of Appeal had L sent to prison, an 11-month sentence replacing the suspended one of 12 months passed by Judge Hehir. Robert Courts KC, for the Solicitor General, described L's abuse of his position for sexual gain as “sickening" and welcomed the “clear message that there are serious consequences for those who carry out misconduct in a public office”. Had that been the original sentence, even liberals like me would have thought it appropriate.
In contrast with that dark episode in his career, Judge Hehir saw no reason for mercy when it came to dealing with pesky disrupters.
He can hardly be shocked to find himself pilloried by everyone except those on the headbanging right of politics for considering the M25 protesters deserving of infinitely greater punishment than a cop who grotesquely abused his position of trust (and power) and had his way with a conveniently available woman. I shall refrain from spelling out where that sort of conduct on the part of a serving police officer can lead in the most extreme of circumstances.
Just Stop Oil? No, Just Read Hehir’s Sentencing Remarks, which can be found in their entirety at this link. Please tell me I am wrong to find his words, in an advanced democracy like ours, rather chilling.
As it happens, I have some sympathy with Just Stop Oil’s cause but - as I have said on Twitter - deplore its chosen methods, which do little to harm official or commercial interests but inflict collective punishment on society.
Judge Hehir rightly listed the adverse effects of the M25 blockade. Missed flights, missed funerals, cancer patient’s missed appointment leaving a two-month wait for another, missed work, special needs kids delayed on their way to school and so on. It amounted to a reprehensible disruption of life for far too many people. Blocking motorways, invading sports fields and theatres, vandalising precious art will never do other than harm. And alienate public opinion that might otherwise feel sympathy with the fundamental cause.
As I wrote to Just Stop Oil when seeking permission to use the photograph of the M25 you see above, “we agree on the unbelievably harsh sentences but not on whether it’s right for an unelected group to inflict collective punishment on society”.
Just Stop Oil’s response was: “Is it right for an unelected group of people, the fossil fuel companies and the world leaders who support them, to inflict collective punishment on the whole of humanity.”
I don’t accept that. And they don’t accept my quarrel with their ultimately counter-productive tactics.
But back to the issue: four and five years in jail for causing inconvenience, even great inconvenience? I imagine Suella Braverman, possibly the worst home secretary Britain has had and certainly a woman who belongs to the kind of a Conservativism that is so contemptuous of the old-fashioned, one-nation decency the party once embraced, will have rejoiced at Judge Hehir’s preposterous, savage punishment of protest.
The rogue cop case alone, in its football equivalent (say four home defeats on the trot), would have produced a sacking. Judge Christopher Hehir remains employed and active, able to present, selectively, his impression of Judge Jeffreys at the Bloody Assizes of 1685.
Anyone with a leaning towards natural justice will be left hoping that the Court of Appeal finds his judgment as repugnant as I do and reduces the sentences to a matter of months not years.
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I don’t write often enough about books. When in the UK, I rarely read them at all unless I need to for work. In France, I get through quite a few of those queuing up from London.
Nazi Wives is an excellent, impressively researched and constructed description of the lives of the women who fell for or saw value in marriage to members of Hitler’s inner circle. For the most part, they heartily swallowed the philosophy adopted and pursued by their menfolk, offering mild opposition only when friends and acquaintances who happened to be Jewish, part-Jewish or considered unfriendly to the cause needed help.
We meet Fraul Goering, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, Heydrich, Hess and spouses of other, less prominent players in the Nazi hierarchy. Only Emmy Goering actually found the anti-Semitism and probably much else disgusting, but she hid behind the facade that as a thespian, she was part of another world, and enjoyed her own prosperity.
Not one of them, Emmy included, would any civilised person, not even the sinister figures who belong to the far right parties of Europe (by which I include Britain), wish to invite home for tea.
But credit to James Wyllie for a superb book. I have not quite finished it but warmly commend it to those who, like me, love to learn about societal aspects of war without having any real interest in military analysis.
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While I’m on about war, forgive me for passing on this YouTube find, which I regard as a gem.
The singer is an American, David Olney, who died in 2020, probably an artist’s perfect death, getting midway through a song live in Florida before stopping, apologising to the audience and then falling silent.
And the song? A tremendously moving story, told as if in the words of a Parisian prostitute who does her best to comfort and please a soldier on leave but destined to return to the trenches and near-certain death.
You do not need to share my love of folk music, traditional and contemporary, to appreciate the dignity, humanity and beauty of this song.
If you wish to read more, go to my folk music website Salut! Live.
The judge's disproportionate sentencing in the two cases is absolutely shocking. Thank you for bringing it to your readers' attention!