Why police hands were tied in the case of the stabbed burglar

Apr 13, 2018 by

by Andrew Tettenborn, The Conservative Woman:

Most TCW readers will have welcomed the decision to bring no charges against the Hither Green pensioner who, cornered in his kitchen by a thug armed with a screwdriver, somehow managed to kill the intruder. Most will also have few good words for the police who locked him up for two nights, leaving his disabled wife without care, or for the hapless CPS, which took a day or more to reach the sensible decision that no proceedings were necessary.

There is no doubt that householders should not have the prospect of this kind of treatment held over them. Even missing out the obvious US comparison, police and prosecutors elsewhere in Europe are far more blasé: it is difficult to imagine a gendarme or an agente giving the homesteader anything other than a discreet thumbs-up in the majority of such cases. But for once, our police and prosecutors are, one suspects, the wrong target. So also, perhaps surprisingly, is the government, which in 2013 actually tried to legislate to stop this happening by supplementing the right to use reasonable force with a provision protecting householders whose acts were not ‘grossly disproportionate’.

The real villain of the piece you may already have guessed. It’s the European Convention on Human Rights, regarded as little short of Holy Writ by the great and the good, who as ever regard it as the highest virtue to insist that every jot and tittle of it be observed. It is this document that forms a large part of the training of every policeman (no argument allowed), and sits metaphorically on the shoulder of every CPS functionary from morning to night. In the present case there is little doubt that, rather like Ed Miliband dancing to the puppet strings of Nicola Sturgeon in the 2015 Tory general election poster, both police and CPS were doing exactly what they were told by the human rights lawyers.

Read here

Read also: The shrine outrage is proof, if any were needed, that the Old Bill has lost the plot completely by Richard Littlejohn, Mailonline

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