Читать книгу The Double Dangerous Book for Boys - Conn Iggulden - Страница 20
ОглавлениеQUESTIONS ABOUT THE LAW – PART ONE
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1. Can the Queen be charged with a crime?
3. When can the police stop and search you?
4. What is the highest court authority in Britain?
5. Can you be tried twice for the same crime?
Ignorance is no defence under the law, so it isn’t enough to say, ‘I didn’t know it was illegal!’ If you don’t know anything about the laws of the land, there will be times when you are effectively helpless. Not everyone has the time or capacity to learn all the ins and outs of the law and its procedures, of course. That is why solicitors and barristers exist – as experts in their field.
In recent years, attempts have been made to make the law more accessible, by replacing Latin terms such as ‘plaintiff’, ‘writ’ and ‘in camera’ with ‘claimant’, ‘claim’ and ‘in private’. As you might guess, we think that’s a shame. Yet regardless of the language used, there will always be a need for expert defence and prosecution.
It seems to us that we should all know a few basics. Our usual explanation in this book is that some knowledge is ‘a joy to own for its own sake’. Yet knowledge of the law might be worth rather more, in the right circumstances.
1
CAN THE QUEEN BE CHARGED WITH A CRIME?
It is a fairly well-known principle that the Queen cannot be prosecuted with a criminal offence. She also cannot be arrested, interviewed in a police station or even stopped by the police and spoken to. She is quite literally above the law, and for good reason. As well as being our monarch, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is also our head of state (and head of state for many other countries). It is very common that heads of state enjoy immunity from prosecution, one of the primary reasons being to protect the country from scandal and embarrassment.
The only sitting monarch to be charged with a crime was Charles I, in 1649. He was famously charged with crimes against his own people and executed, following the end of the English Civil War. Parliament established the High Court of Justice to try Charles I for treason, the justification being that the king had made war and a secret pact with the Scots, which had led to great loss of life. The trial was prosecuted by the first solicitor general of England, John Cook, who came from a Leicestershire farming family.
Following the English Restoration of 1660, which saw Charles II (Charles I’s son) take the throne, a new law was passed that condemned the revolution and its protagonists. Brilliantly named the ‘Indemnity and Oblivion Act’, this piece of legislation delegitimised the entire period following Charles I’s execution up until the Restoration. John Cook, alongside all those who had officiated over the trial of King Charles, was named by the Act as traitor and convicted of regicide. The penalty for such a crime? Cook was hanged, drawn and quartered. He is, however, peerless in legal history as the first lawyer to prosecute a head of state, an event seen by many as the foundation stone of modern international criminal law.
The closest any modern monarch has come to a brush with the courts was King George V (our current Queen’s grandfather), who in 1910 was accused of bigamy by a republican newspaper. He sued the paper for libel and was apparently prepared to give evidence. However, the attorney general advised that it would be unconstitutional and that put an end to it. The journalist, Edward Mylius, was convicted regardless and sentenced to twelve months in prison.
Unfortunately for them, the Queen’s wider family do not enjoy the same untouchable status as Elizabeth II. Her daughter, Anne, the Princess Royal, was once summonsed to appear at Slough Magistrates’ Court for speeding. In the absence of a revolution, however, it is almost unimaginable that we will ever see the Queen anywhere near a courtroom.
Parliament could, of course, change the law in this area if they wished, although they would need the Queen’s assent to pass the Act, so that’s not very likely either!
2
Treason is a crime committed against the Crown and is one of the most infamous and serious crimes a person can face. The original common-law offence was brought into law by the Treason Act 1351. One of the oldest laws still in force in the UK today, it defines treason as:
Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the Chancellor, Treasurer, or Judges in Execution of their Duty.
Perhaps the most famous traitor in British history is Guy Fawkes, who was brutally tortured and then executed in 1606 for his part in the Gunpowder Plot. The event is still marked today on 5 November, Bonfire Night. The last person to be hanged in this country for the offence of high treason was a man called William Brooke Joyce (aka Lord Haw-Haw), in 1946, for ‘adhering to the King’s enemies’ by spreading Nazi propaganda during WWII. This was despite Joyce being an American citizen at the time and therefore technically not one of the King’s subjects.
The introduction of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 reduced the maximum penalty for an offence of treason in the UK to one of life imprisonment. The offence of ‘high treason’ has not been used since the war and more recent high-profile prosecutions for behaviour that the public might consider ‘treasonous’ have tended to rely on other offences of a similar nature, such as breaching the Official Secrets Act.
One of the most famous cases of recent times was that of the former British spy George Blake, who worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1961, after being taken prisoner during the Korean War. He was caught and sentenced to forty-two years in prison, the longest sentence in British history at the time – said to represent a year for the life of each MI6 agent he had given up to the Russians. Blake managed to escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison and fled to Russia soon afterwards.
However, despite the range of modern sentences available, if a British subject made a direct attempt on the Queen’s life today, then he or she could very well expect to be charged and convicted with the offence of high treason.
3
WHEN CAN THE POLICE STOP AND SEARCH YOU?
The main powers of the police come from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, normally referred to as PACE. Section 1 of PACE confers powers on police to stop and search any person where they have a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the person may be carrying a weapon, illegal drugs or stolen property. They can even search you for perfectly legal items such as a crowbar or screwdriver, if they have grounds to suspect that it is intended to be used in a crime (referred to as ‘going equipped’). In the year up to March 2017, the Metropolitan Police carried out over 137,000 stop and searches in London alone and it remains an effective tool in the fight against drug-related violent crime.
A police officer may stop you in the street and ask you what your name is and where you are going, and there is nothing to say that you must stop and answer him. If you choose not to, and there is no other reason to suspect anything is wrong, then the police have no right to search you. However, refusing to answer these questions may give the police ‘reasonable suspicion’ that you have some criminal reason for not wanting to speak to them. It is therefore normally advisable to cooperate with the police, unless of course you really are hiding something. Perhaps it’s also worth pointing out that the police do a very difficult job, during which they often deal with angry, rude and violent people. It doesn’t hurt you to be courteous and polite when dealing with a police officer – and it might help.
4
WHAT IS THE HIGHEST COURT AUTHORITY IN BRITAIN?
For centuries the highest court in Britain was the House of Lords. Sometimes confused with its namesake, the parliamentary House of Lords, this was in fact the supreme court in Britain until 2009. It was originally a court intended to try peers of the realm (lords who had been charged with crimes), as well as being a court of last resort in the UK and across the Commonwealth. In 2009, many of the judicial functions of the House of Lords were transferred to the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which is the highest court authority for anything governed by English, Welsh and Northern Irish law, as well as for any matters in Scottish civil law. The ‘Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’ remains the highest appellate court for a number of Commonwealth countries and Crown dependencies (such as the Falkland Islands).
While the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, Britain has been a member of the European Economic Community (later the EU) since 1973 and has therefore been subject to the rulings of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). However, the supremacy of the European Courts has always sat uneasily with the UK’s unique, largely unwritten constitution and the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Many have argued that being subject to the ECJ fundamentally undermines a central tenet of the British constitution, while others point to the fact that Parliament could, ultimately, withdraw the UK from the EU at any time, thus preserving its sovereignty. At the time of writing, it is impossible to say whether EU law will still apply in the UK after 2019.
5
CAN YOU BE TRIED TWICE FOR THE SAME CRIME?
For centuries a legal principle existed in the UK that prevented a defendant being retried for the same offence, or a similar offence arising out of the same facts, if he or she had already faced trial and been acquitted. However, that rule was removed by the Criminal Justice Act, introduced in April 2005, which allows the Crown Prosecution Service to reopen cases where ‘new and compelling’ evidence comes to light. There have been several cases where defendants acquitted of serious crimes, such as murder or involvement in organised crime, have given interviews to the press and even written books in which they appear to admit their crimes. However, this evidence is often inadmissible in court, so cannot be used to reopen old cases. The development of DNA techniques, however, as well as other digital forensic investigation tools, means that prosecutors can now re-examine serious cases in which they suspect a miscarriage of justice, such as the murder of Julie Hogg by her boyfriend Billy Dunlop in 1986. Dunlop was acquitted after two juries failed to reach verdicts, meaning that he could not be prosecuted again for the crime. Knowing this, Dunlop confessed to having killed Hogg to a prison guard while serving a sentence for assault. He was also reported to have confessed the crime to Judge Michael Taylor during a closed family hearing following the criminal trials. The double-jeopardy principle meant that he could only be prosecuted for perverting the course of justice at his original trial, for which he received a six-year sentence. Following the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act, however, Dunlop became the first person ever to be convicted of an offence in the UK having previously been acquitted.
