The most depressing element of the hopeless way our courts have dealt with the Urewera terror charges may be in the fine print of their reasoning tossing out Police evidence.
There is ineffable arrogance in deciding the the interests of victims and potential victims rank behind the Court interest in sending a stern message to the Police about the things they think the Police should not do. Instead of asserting or seeking powers to penalise the allegedly improper Police conduct, they reward offenders and punish the innocent. And these are the people with the effrontery to lecture us about "proportionality" in citizen responses to criminal aggression.
Secondly, the reasoning takes us even further from our great British inheritance that held the Police were not a praetorian guard, with special legal status. Instead they were just citizens doing fulltime what all decent citizens could and would do when faced with crime. Sadly the Supreme Court has said that the Police have more limited rights than the rest of us except as expressly stated in legislation. What a constitutional muddle we are getting from the Wilson Court
Instead of asserting or seeking powers to penalise the allegedly improper Police conduct, they reward offenders and punish the innocent.
Isn't that what the Evidence Act as passed by Parliament requires? Should we be surprised that they're applying it?
the reasoning takes us even further from our great British inheritance that held the Police were not a praetorian guard, with special legal status. Instead they were just citizens doing fulltime what all decent citizens could and would do when faced with crime.
This was private land. Decent citizens couldn't lawfully go onto it and surreptitiously film what was happening.
I also look forward to hearing your argument in favour of abolishing the police database of fingerprints and DNA.