The new police crime map (police.uk) is the third version to hit the internet since January 2009. Earlier attempts didn’t particularly excite the interest of the public. This time the site buckled under the pressure of 18 million hits an hour. So what’s different? Unlike previous incarnations (see the Met’s borough and ward crime map […]
Category Archives: The Justice System
21st Century Court Reporting
Reports that legal history had been made by a judge allowing the use of Twitter in open court for an extradition hearing in London sparked a few earth-shattering predictions. Was this the end of court reporting as we know it? Could this be ‘possibly the final nail in the coffin of shorthand’? Will court hearings soon be televised? […]
Third Time Lucky? The case of Anthony Carter
It could almost be a scientific experiment. Take one murder case, subject it to three trials, each with different juries, and await the results. Would you expect the verdicts to be the same?
The Sentencing Con Trick
If a man receives an eight year sentence for robbery, how much time does he actually serve behind bars? It’s not eight years, for a start. It might not even be four years, although most criminals are told they will serve half their sentences before being released on licence. Some are released even earlier on […]
Murder Law
Reading the recent stories about plans to introduce US-style murder charges to the UK, it seems very few people understand how our system works. It began with Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, joining calls for the offence to be split into first and second degree murder – first degree for intentional killing and second degree […]