Programming note: Please join Mark later today for the latest episode of our brand new Tale for Our Time - Agatha Christie's second caper, The Secret Adversary, airing at 7pm North American Eastern every night. If you missed this month's first tale - The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe - that can be found here.
~Not so long ago, when newspapering was still a going concern, being a "court reporter" was a much sought-after beat - albeit modestly demanding, in that one was expected to know something about the case one was covering and the legal questions it raised.
Not anymore - as I learned during my own trial in the District of Columbia Superior Court a few weeks back. The likes of The New York Times and NPR never sent a reporter to court to cover proceedings for a single day, but instead waited until the verdict and then had the "climate correspondent" write it up as a story about "attacks on climate scientists".
~And so it goes. This week in London Tommy Robinson won a truly spectacular victory over the bent coppers of the disgustingly corrupt Metropolitan Police. That's to say, the judge dismissed the case, as I put it, "on the quaint grounds that his arrest was not lawful". None of it was lawful - not the "dispersal order", not the plods' physical manhandling, not the bail conditions, not one jot or tittle. Robinson's victory was total - and that's a good thing if you believe in, as the Met apparently do not, the rule of law.
But you won't know that if you watch, say, Sky News. The accused's frustration at being questioned by Sky court reporter Bonehedda McArsepants is wholly merited:
A revealing exchange:
DEFENDANT TOMMY ROBINSON: What is my alleged offence?
SKY NEWS "REPORTER" BONEHEDDA McARSEPANTS: I'm bored now.
~Here's another case that would have benefitted from a real court reporter in the press gallery. Hollywood sex fiend Harvey Weinstein's downfall precipitated the whole #MeToo movement, so there was a lot riding on his conviction. Nevertheless, even in the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt courthouses of New York, certain minimal obligations to prove one's case are still supposed to apply.
Instead, as our pals Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer noted on last month's Mark Steyn Cruise, whenever the defence started speaking everyone in the press gallery just put down their notebooks and ignored them (I know the feeling). Here's what Ann said on our show:
ANN McELHINNEY: Have you heard of Harvey Weinstein? Right? How many people think he should be in prison? Okay, all the people with their hands up, you are wrong... You're not dishonest; you just don't know. And the reason you don't know is it was never reported on except for by [GESTURES AT HERSELF AND PHELIM McALEER]. And you can get that podcast for free, we'll indicate where to go to it.
We went to that court case every day and I can tell you what was amazing to me and super depressing was it was packed, the courtroom, with journalists from all over the world - packed. We had to get up at four o'clock in the morning and stand in the cold, and anyway all of that, right..?
But here's what the defence brought out. Here's the question: if you were raped, do you think you would write to your rapist afterwards and say, 'I'd love you to meet my mother'? Do you think you would write to your rapist hundreds of emails saying, 'You mean more to me than my father. Can we meet?' Would you write—I'll just do one more and then I'm stopping - would you write to your rapist the day after you were raped and say, 'I'd love to go to London. Yeah, can you pay for me to go to London?' And go to London, and, when you're in London, get in touch with your rapist and say, 'Oh my God, I just heard that you're coming to London. I want to change my flight. So I'm here when you're in London.' That put him in prison for twenty-three years.
STEYN: Okay, just to be clear here: Harvey Weinstein is a disgusting individual and a totally repulsive creature, and a man with very strange personal habits, particularly if you happen to like potted plants... And you certainly should not let your daughters anywhere near the guy. But the fact of the matter is that that trial was a travesty.
Well, it's taken a while but New York's highest court has belatedly caught up with Ann and Phelim:
Harvey Weinstein's New York rape conviction was overturned Thursday by New York state's highest court, which ordered that the disgraced Hollywood mogul should face a new trial.
In a 4-3 ruling, the New York State Court of Appeals found that a Manhattan judge "erroneously" allowed testimony from three women whose allegations weren't connected to the case.
That's not a small error. American "justice" is all about what the judge permits to be put before the jury: huge amounts of billable hours are spent in pre-trial bollocks about keeping stuff out and getting other stuff in. In my own case, for example, I was not allowed to bring up the British Columbia Supreme Court's decision in Mann's suit against Tim Ball ...but Mann got away with breezily perjuring himself in the witness box re the Ball case. Yet, even by the woeful standards of the DC septic tank, Weinstein's judge - one James Burke - had only the shakiest grasp of the concept of impartial justice ...and four out of seven justices were fairly withering:
"The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial," the appeals court said.
"Egregious" is rather strong language for an appellate court to use about the trial judge. (Full disclosure: I've been through the New York appeals rigmarole myself and came out of it pretty spectacularly.)
As for Mr Burke, he is no longer on the bench. And good riddance. He embodies the degeneration of American law, into a land of legalisms.
Not long after the OJ trial, I was at a small event in Hollywood, on the Paramount lot, at which the after-dinner speaker was Bill Maher. He commented that the LAPD is so incompetent they can't even frame a guilty man. Bill got a big laugh: Back then, there were a lot of jokes like that - because there's a lot of that about. Likewise, even in New York, getting a perv should not require (as we say in less corrupt jurisdictions) perverting the course of justice. In the English sense, the real pervert here was the "egregious" Judge Burke.
~But there are plenty of Burkes left on the New York bench. Here is corrupt judge Juan Merchan putting his fat butt on the scales of justice - and interfering ever more brazenly in the US "election":
The judge looked at President Trump's campaign schedule and then scheduled a hearing.
This court is all politics.
It's a terrible precedent that the Democrats are creating. https://t.co/6Myn7Bj1LB
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) April 26, 2024
Under New York judicial procedures, a defendant is supposed to attend every day of his trial - a court rule that I doubt is "constitutional", as the conservative vaudevillians would say. I did not attend each day of my own trial in DC, due to the deleterious impact of the broken courtroom air-conditioning on my health. [RELATED: As Donald Trump entered the NYC courthouse this very morning, he commented to the press on the freezing courtroom, saying he believes the thermostat was intentionally set that way and adding: it isn't that hard; why can't they regulate the temperature?]
At any rate, Judge Merchan scheduled the trial for every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday - with Wednesday as the "off" day. So Trump, with excessive deference, agreed to confine his presidential campaigning to Wednesdays.
Merchan waits for Trump to schedule his first big midweek rallies - and then announces a sudden Wednesday trial day.
Like Burke, he should not be on the bench.
Trump is going down in this court. So he should do the rallies, and force the issue sooner rather than later - via an interlocutory hearing at the NY Appeals Court or the US Supreme Court. The vandalisation of law and justice is destroying America.
~Thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly couple of months - and your support for Steyn's free-speech cases in both Washington and London over two of the most pressing issues of the age - "global warming" (Big Climate) and the Covid vaccines (Big Pharma). We thank especially all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And Mark looks forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court on June 11th.
See you tonight for Tales for Our Time.
