Seeking the whole truth will always be a painful process
Monday 27th June 2011, 8:33AM BST.
Peter Rhodes writes: Let us suppose that the defending barrister in the Milly Dowler murder trial had been forbidden by the judge from questioning her relatives to establish that she was a sad little girl who might have run away from home, on the grounds that such questioning would deeply distress the family.
If Levi Bellfield had been convicted, his defence team would have gone straight to the Appeal Court to point out that this evidence had been withheld from the jury.
The Appeal judges would probably have quashed the conviction as “unsafe and unsound” and the Dowler family would have been utterly heartbroken.
A murder trial is a ruthless hunt for the whole truth and you cannot ban part of that hunt to spare the feelings of anyone.
Cops and politicians talk glibly about making a kinder system but they must know in their hearts it cannot happen.
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Oh come on!
If Milly Dowler had been unhappy at home and had run away, how does this make it acceptable for this lowlife to kill her? How would this even justify mitigating circumstances?
How the judge accepted this line of questioning as permissible is beyond me and, I’m sure, the vast majority of the public.
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I think you have completely missed the point of the article here good sir
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I can see Peter’s point but he says “probably” would have quashed the decision. I am not so convinced that they would. I assume the Court of Appeal would have concluded the evidence omitted did not materially affect the outcome.
The problem is procedural in that in this country there is no pre-hearing before the judge prior to the trial starting. Where this occurs, the judge can disallow evidence as being irrelevant.
I would wager that his barrister was doing him no favours using this line of questioning. The more he persisted the more he ensured a guilty verdict because I assume the jury would become more angry as it went on and make a convicion a certainty.
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