Justice?

Pc Simon Harwood, the officer who did this to shambling, alcoholic, innocent Ian Tomlinson, has been found not guilty of manslaughter. Despite Tomlinson having done nothing to provoke or inconvenience the police, a jury decided that Harwood - a man with a litany of violent assaults and corruption on his record - should go free.



What is manslaughter? It's killing someone without 'malice aforethought' (though malice seems pretty apparent in the video), and by being 'grossly negligent' about the victim's life and safety. Harwood smashed into Tomlinson from behind and without warning - which seems pretty negligent to me. Tomlinson may have been drunk or otherwise oblivious to events, and his physical condition may have made death more likely, but Harwood wasn't to know this - and nor should the jury have taken it into account. Did Harwood smash someone up without consideration of Tomlinson's safety? Clearly yes.

The coroner thought so - he declared a verdict of unlawful killing. Juries rarely find police officers guilty, but I'm shocked by this one - it took the view that Harwood didn't use criminal force and the blow didn't cause Tomlinson's death. Two pathologists testified: one who said the blow did kill him and one who said it didn't. The jury wasn't told that he's the cops' usual tame pathologist and one who's been twice suspended for making postmortem mistakes and kicked off the Home Office's register of approved pathologists. So much for justice.

The family intends to mount a civil action against Harwood. I hope they win. I've served on a jury. Between the prejudices of my fellow jurors, the stupidity of the lawyers (for the prosecution and the defence), police failures (in one case, innocence could easily have been established - in the other, guilt could equally easily have been proven) and judicial detachment from reality ('what is this 'Stella Artois'? 'A lager beer, your Honour' 'And in what quantities does one consume this 'Stella Artois'?'), I didn't feel justice was done at all.

Fisked!

Over at George Monbiot's place, we get the final of his Christopher Booker prize, awarded for the most unscientific bullshit in environmental journalism, calculated by errors per words (and named after the Telegraph's resident conspiracy theorist and nutter. The winner is John Tomlinson of the Flint Journal for an article which is riddled with howlers, as Monbiot painstakingly and exhaustively (but entertainingly) points out:

He has now seen off all possible contenders (except perhaps a repeat performance by his good self), with a cracking 38 howlers in one short column for the Flint Journal. Ironically he made these errors in response to my exposure of his previous claims.

Amazingly, this even beats his own provisional world record for density: the ratio of falsehoods to words. His first column averaged one misleading statement for every 26 words. This one delivers one per 21 words. I intend to submit his second column to the Guinness Book of Records as the most inaccurate article ever published in a newspaper.

Secondly, this astonishing wealth of disinformation means it has probably taken me 100 times longer to respond to his article than he took to write it.