The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor by Cameron McCabe

Author:Cameron McCabe
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: マイコンテンツ
Published: 2011-01-27T05:07:49.396000+00:00

Twenty-three

But the trial did not come yet. First they locked me up for one night, then they brought me to the Marylebone Police Court and asked me a lot of questions. I said: 'I have nothing to say, I reserve my defence.' So they sent me to Brixton Prison and gave me a nice quiet cell which was fun for the first hours and hell ever after. But at least I could read. I asked them whether I would be allowed to read some law books and they brought me two. Both were written by two authors each, which was quite proper if you considered that the one had 607 pages and the other one 1,622. One was calledPrinciples and Practice of the Criminal Law, by Seymour F. Harris, B.C.L., M.A. (Oxon), and A. M. Wilshere, M.A., LL.B. The other one, the bigger one, was Archbold's Criminal Pleading, Evidence, and Practice, by Robert Ernest Ross, of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-law, Chief Clerk in the Court of Criminal Appeal, and Theobald Richard Fitzwalter Butler, of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-law, Midland Circuit. They were good books, both of them, and by consulting the one where I couldn't follow the other I got on quite well and at the end I found I liked them both and I had learned a lot.

I learned that whether I'd done it or not did not really matter. What did matter was for them to build up a case against their suspect—I being the suspect—then to take care that all details in their case fitted well within the frame of the law, afterwards to pronounce judgement upon me and finally to proceed with the punishment which would probably be death if they could build up a case for murder, or lifelong penal servitude if they couldn't build anything better than just a cheap case of manslaughter. On my part I was neither asked nor allowed to build up a case of my own and make it stick and put it against their case and let the jury decide which of the two cases was the better one—an arrangement which would have been only fair once they had dropped all pretensions to tell and prove the things that had really happened. It is unfair competition to let the counsel for the prosecution, a professional, build up a case against you, a mere amateur. And even if you buy a professional to fight for you, the fight in the court would still be a foul one because the counsel for the prosecution is allowed to build up a case of his own while your counsel, instead of being allowed to build up a counter-case for you, is only allowed to hit out against the other guy's case. It is unfair because it gives your opponent a chance to choose his weapons and because it forces you to fight him on a basis which suits him best. Archbold says on page 875: 'The defendant has to prove, either that the murder was not committed by him, or that the offence actually committed does not amount to murder.

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