General Easter Catchup

On Good Friday it was reported that Russell Brand accused two British showbusiness stars of paedophilia. This connects with another story from the middle of last month as reported in London’s free newspaper The Evening Standard where for the a high-ranking prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service told the press there would be further arrests connected to the offshoot enquiry running alongside the main strand investigating Jimmy Savile. The Standard piece also reported that the comments were made at an event organised by a political think tank, Policy Exchange.

Clearly the lessons from the Twitter Libelling of Lord McAlpine last year have not been learned if public officials feel the need to hype up arrests in advance. Maybe the next step will be to import the New York Perp Walk for the accused considering the media has decided to try anybody named and labelling them as guilty and letting them put in their Not Guilty pleas before they actually go to court. Russell Brand’s attack on other people in showbusiness was as misguided as it was self promoting, considering there are judges in England who refuse to jail people downloading child abuse images “because they would have a hard time in prison”. The UK already has sentences which are too short, and this judge had already been censured by his peers once before.

Brand could also have gone to the police with what he knew, and so far, we don’t know whether the police already have the names he mentioned for the “others” inquiry parallell to Savile’s. The CSA downloader had had this sentence previously suspended, so once he re-offended following treatment, he should have gone to prison anyway. The judge believes public shaming is enough of a punishment but we’ll have to wait and see whether it’s third time lucky and a different judge puts Mark Martin in prison where he belonged the first two times.