The Price of Innocence by Michael Russell & Iain McKie

Author:Michael Russell & Iain McKie [Russell, Michael and McKie, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781495653728
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd

11

A Policeman Calls with a Bill

Day 2,646

Iain spent the last weeks of March and the first week in April recuperating. But the latter part of the month was clouded with more worry. The Strathclyde police board had resolved to pursue recovery of their legal expenses arising out of Shirley’s failed civil action against the police two years previously and had – out of the blue – asked for at least £13,000 which it described as ‘non-disputed’. Other sums in the case might bring the total amount to over £20,000. Shirley did not have this money – the present legal action was being undertaken without fee, with the hope that a win would result in costs paid by the Scottish Executive. Shirley was earning nothing apart from a small pension.

She took the news about the imminent police demand very badly. On top of everything else, it meant that she was now facing the prospect of bankruptcy. She was frequently in tears over the next few days. Her sense of fear and helplessness was compounded a few days later when two sheriff’s officers arrived at her door with a payment demand.

Iain and Michael decided that publicity would be the only effective weapon against this and Michael alerted the Herald, for which he was working both as a cultural columnist and as a contributor of a series of policy pieces. They commissioned a special feature which was published on 7 April 2004 in the same edition as a prominent news story which exclusively revealed the police’s financial pressure on Shirley. The tone of outrage in Russell’s article – he described the whole matter ‘as the disgraceful signs of a forensic system in crisis, a judicial system devoid of integrity and a government without a basic sense of decency’ – was taken up by most of the press. Coverage appeared on radio and television too. The story of the police demand headlined BBC Radio Scotland news that morning and there was a strong public reaction to it. In Glasgow that afternoon, Russell was approached by several strangers, all of whom were sympathetic to Shirley. One man simply said, ‘It’s a disgrace what that woman has had to put up with.’

Shirley concurred but she put it more graphically, telling the Sunday Herald feature writer Susan Flockhart that it seemed to her as if she was being ‘assaulted, abused and raped by Strathclyde Police and the justice system’. Flockhart’s piece, which appeared on 11 April, was perceptive and sensitive. She had been at school with Shirley, in the year above her and remembered her as ‘a bright, pretty girl with an impish grin’. She noted that in Shirley’s face now was the weariness and haunted fear of ‘someone who felt she had been humiliated, violated and brought to the point of suicide by the Scottish justice system’.

That week Iain and Michael met Jimmy Cassels who was very nervous that the publicity would hinder the delicate legal discussions going on. Iain, didn’t reassure him, making it clear he was not going to be stifled or forced into line by legal niceties.

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