This is an example of a journalist ‘dubbing’ a killer, in an attempt to make them more memorable.
‘Dubbing’ in this way is often hotly contested – Stephen Wright, the man who killed five women in the Ipswich area in 2006, was referred to variously as the ‘Suffolk Strangler’, the ‘Ipswich Ripper’, the ‘East Anglian Ripper’ or the ‘Red-light Ripper’.
Usually newspapers steer away from using their rivals’ tags unless they become universally recognised by the public.
This time Griffiths went for something he had read while in custody. He could have come up with his own but it seems he liked the attention he was already getting.
Giving nicknames to serial killers may strike many as gruesome or a glorification of the criminal over his victims, who are quickly forgotten. However, the practice is a long-standing one and must pre-date newspapers.
So what makes a memorable nickname?
Alliteration – Stockwell Strangler, Crossbow Cannibal, Moors Murderers, Beast of the Bastille, Giggling Granny
Rhyme – Gay Slayer, Hannibal the Cannibal
Rhythm – Jack the Ripper, Doctor Death
Allusion / Imitation – Yorkshire Ripper, Angel of Death, The Terminator, Camden Ripper
What does this graph tell us? It’s meant to show the frequency of the terms murder and homicide in English books from the time of ‘Jack the Ripper’ to the present day.
The answer is probably ‘not much’ – apart from showing that murder is used much more often (in those books that have been scanned by Google) than homicide. Murder also spiked in use at around 1931, which may or may not be related to the output of Agatha Christie and others at that time.
But Google’s Books Ngram Viewer is still an interesting ‘visualisation tool’ which allows anyone to input words or phrases to create their own graph. You can also click different time periods to see which books make up the data.
Examples already doing the rounds include ‘love vs war’ or ‘geek vs nerd’.
Here’s what happens when you type in ‘Jack the Ripper.’
Just to prove it isn’t entirely accurate, closer inspection shows the first blip clocks in at 1883. It turns out these entries result from cataloging based on the founding date of the organisation producing the material or scanning errors caused by ‘OCR’ (Optical Character Recognition).
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? Should everyone be allowed to digitally record proceedings?
The ensuing debate conjured up pin-sharp HD images of a future where legal cases are reported as they happen by a series of tweets, freely available to all at no cost whatsoever.
Compare this to the faded daguerrotype of decrepit court reporters shuffling out of court at the end of proceedings with their notebooks of laboriously written shorthand which has to be transcribed back to English in their heads and then inputted into a computer before being edited, amended, polished and printed on newspapers perused by the few at a price.
Julian Assange
But let’s not get carried away. For a start, the Julian Assange extradition case is relatively unique. The outcome of the hearing was of interest to a vast international audience and concerned a man who has become the figurehead for a crusade on behalf of openness in government. Wikileaks, the organisation he founded, has been a popular subject on Twitter for months.
As Adam Wagner has said on the UK Human Rights Blog, the power of Twitter ‘lies in its system of replies, followers, categories and retweets, whereby people can research and broadcast information in an extremely specific and targeted way to to the world at large.’
Reporters have been tweeting (and texting) in this way for a long time now, even if it usually has to be done away from the eyes of suspicious court staff. So it is not a new development, it is just that the Times reporter Alexi Mostrous felt it necessary to ask the judge for permission and then publicised the granting of permission. (There are two ways of confronting obstructive rules – ask for permission first or flout and argue later).
While courts have become more lenient about allowing laptops to be used openly (nobody seems to mind an ipad being flipped open), mobile phones are seen as insidious devices designed to break the rules. Journalists are told to turn them off and reprimanded if caught ‘playing’ with them during a case.
No doubt this rule developed because of the frequency that ridiculous ringtones went off every five minutes, but they can also interfere with TV and speaker equipment. And it may sound stupid, but people have tried to take pictures of defendants in the court, no doubt so they can later hang them on their bedroom walls.
And perhaps the idea that the journalist is having fun texting his friends and lovers while everybody else has to concentrate also plays a part.
There are other reasons why this type of hearing was more suited to Twitter. As an extradition case held before a district judge it could be commented upon by whoever cares to share their opinion, whether instantly via twitter or at leisure on their blog.
This does not apply to jury trials where comment is outlawed and prejucidial information not heard by the jury is banned by the Contempt of Court Act. Why? Because it is the received opinion that giving juries every little piece of information would be like handing them a stick of dynamite.
In the world of court, not everything is relevant to the case. How this works in practice has been developed over the centuries. It is the judge’s task to decide what the jury should be told (and in this way he works a bit like an old-style newspaper).
Is it relevant that a rape victim’s sexual history should be laid out in open court? What about a defendant’s list of previous convictions? How about the suspicions and speculations of witnesses and police officers based on rumour and the ‘word on the street’? What exactly counts as ‘evidence’?
There are countless examples of verdicts being overturned because a juror was told how to vote by her husband, or did research on the internet or visited the murder scene on their own or generally tried to take up their deerstalker and pipe and investigate the case themselves.
Counter to this establishment fear of being held to ransom by ill-educated and easily-swayed juries runs the growing feeling that there should be more trust in the public. Are they not capable of deciding what is relevant and what is not? This is to a certain extent how the system works in the US, although they have a complicated jury selection process which strikes most British observers as deeply strange. Here in the UK we select at random, discriminating neither by age, race, religion or intelligence.
So it’s about trust. And if open tweeting from court is going to increase interest and trust in the workings of our justice system then that can only be a good thing. Likewise cameras in court – they will neither bring down the system or replace journalists, they will hopefully augment both.
All this doesn’t mean that court reporting is dead. It just means that like everything else it is being improved and adapted as time goes by. There will always be a market for an entertaining report of court proceedings. It isn’t always just about the result.
Equally it doesn’t mean that shorthand is dead, despite its reputation for being antiquated and unnecessary now that lovely shiny digital recorders are available. Recorders are fine for those who aren’t working to a tight deadline but they are absolutely useless for those occasions when people want accurate and readable copy of more than 140 characters within 20 minutes.
Paradoxically this is a skill that has been on the decline in recent years as newspapers cut back and bring their deadlines forward to save money.
But when people have turned away from printed newspapers talking about yesterday’s news and started favouring the internet with its ever-shifting front pages, surely shorthand is more important than ever? It is a skill that places the competent reporter with an advantage over their rivals at a time when it appears that everyone wants to be a journalist.
In a world where the norm is for news to be provided for free, quality will be king.
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?
This actually happened to Anthony Carter, a 37 year-old man who was suspected of shooting a hotel waiter dead during a £50 ‘drug deal gone wrong’ in Tottenham in 1998.
Anthony Carter
Carter was linked to the crime by his DNA found on a baseball cap found clutched in the victim’s hand at the scene and an alleged confession he made to his ex-girlfriend ten years later. He was not identified by eyewitnesses and he denied being the gunman.
His defence was that his cap had gone missing some time earlier and that his former partner was being vindictive to get full control of their child.
Carter first went on trial in January 2009 but the jury was unable to reach a majority verdict and was discharged.
The retrial began in June 2009 and this time he was convicted and jailed for life with a minimum of 20 years behind bars.
But the story didn’t end there.
Carter’s lawyers appealed the decision of the trial judge to allow the jury to be told of a conviction for possession of a gun after the murder took place. The appeal court directed that he be tried a third time, this time without mention of that information.
At the third and final trial in November 2010, Carter was cleared of murder by the jury and left court a free man.
Three different juries, three different verdicts.
We are not allowed to know what goes on in a jury room so exactly what influences their collective decision is unknown.
However the jury was not the only variable in this experiment. The third trial was overseen by a different judge, presented by a different prosecutor and took place in a different courtroom. No doubt the accounts of the witnesses and even the defendant at court varied slightly.
And perhaps the knowledge that Carter had handled a gun, even if it postdated the crime, may have tipped reasonable doubt into certainty of guilt.
But if this case reveals anything, it is how one decision made by 12 members of the public can completely change a life. It is perhaps for this reason that some people want to do away with juries altogether.
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 electronic tags.
So what is the point of providing a number at all? Isn’t it just playing mind games with the public?
Most people know that prisoners only serve half their sentences, but just as a CD sounds more attractive to buy at £9.99 than £10, so an eight year sentence for a violent robber sounds better than four years.
This trick, while not an outright deception, is similar to the use of the ‘life sentence’. We all know that life does not mean life, but to many it sounds more like an appropriate punishment for murder.
At least with life sentences and the relatively new ‘imprisonment for public protection’ (IPP), we are told the minimum term that must be served behind bars.
This is why the press now tends to say a killer has been jailed for 30 years rather than ‘jailed for life.’ People aren’t stupid, so why should we use ambiguous phrases?
The Government say they want to increase public understanding and confidence in the system. It’s one of the reasons why the Sentencing Council has begun a public consultation on guidelines for assault cases. The idea is to ensure violent criminals are dealt with consistently and on the same basis by courts across the country.
Judges will now have to skip through eight steps, bearing in mind a large number of variables along the way, before they come up with the magic number.
Obviously it helps to set this all out, just so we know that people aren’t being sentenced according to the roll of a dice or what side of bed the judge rolled out of, but is that really why people lack confidence in the system?
Do we really need a step by step guide that turns judges into little more than robots in wigs?
A Robot in a Wig
What needs immediate reform is not the way the number is arrived at, but the number itself.
Let that number be the amount of time that a prisoner will actually spend in jail.
We should not have to immediately resort to arithmetic, or whip out our calculators, to arrive at the truth.*
*For those who are interested, for normal ‘determinate’ sentences you take the number provided and divide it by two before subtracting the days already spent in jail awaiting trial. For ‘indeterminate’ sentences like life sentences and IPP, the judge announces the minimum term that must be served before being released on licence. Life sentences mean the offender must spend their entire life on licence, while IPP sentences allow for the licence period to finish after ten years.
