We must defend these ‘rapists’ – or YOU will be locked up next

Feb 14, 2016 by

by Peter Hitchens, Mailonline:

This is the way we lose our freedom, through the semi-secret decisions of boot-faced bureaucrats and the slavish obedience of over-zealous policemen.

Almost nobody cares about the presumption of innocence until it affects them personally, but it is actually far more important to British liberty than the freedom to vote, let alone the miserable Human Rights Act.

As long as the State has to prove you are guilty before throwing you into prison, you are safe. As soon as you have to prove you are innocent, a nasty government or a raging mob can have you locked away for years and you can do nothing about it.

Our current national frenzy about sex crimes has caused us to forget this. Surely, the worse the crime of which you are accused, the more you need to be sure you will get a fair trial.

So there should have been the most enormous row when Sir Thomas Winsor, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, declared on November 18, 2014, referring to cases of rape: ‘The police should immediately institutionalise the presumption that the victim is to be believed.’

There wasn’t any row at all. In fact, I fear I didn’t even notice it when it happened.

But no wonder, after that, that those accused of such crimes found themselves subjected to heavy-handed punishment without trial.

From a person of such authority, this shocking rubbish was far worse than the recent crass remark by an individual police officer that an allegation was ‘credible and true’ before it had seen a courtroom, or promises to accusers that ‘you will be believed’. If this is so in sex cases, how long before it is so in cases where people are charged with breaches of political correctness? There is no shortage of accusers.

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