Thursday 29 April 2010

TEACHER LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE, REVISITED

 skymadeupnewsandfilth at the coalface

woman on a raft has left a new comment on your post "TEACHER LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE?":

Mr Harvey has been acquitted of attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

"It emerged during the four-day trial that pupils at the school were trying to wind up Harvey so his reaction could be caught on a camcorder being used secretly by a girl in the class. The footage was then to be passed around the school as a way of "humiliating" the teacher."

They sure got their footage. Make the parents watch it on a continuous loop and let them wonder: "Suppose it was me or the missus or the kid at work, would I want to be victimized like that?" And then make the head teacher watch it for letting his charges fall so low.

Judge Michael Stokes QC made some interesting statements. I bet he's breathing a sigh of relief, though.

"Judge Michael Stokes QC said: "Common sense has prevailed now we have heard all the evidence." Turning to Harvey, the judge said: "I'm not going to send you to prison for this offence. I'm not even going to impose a suspended sentence. That would be wrong given that you have already served a sentence longer than can be lawfully suspended. This court is looking to impose a community order which will assist you with the problems that you have had."

There you go, Mr Ishmael, a rare example of a judge calling it right. Polish it up and stick it on the mantelpiece.

I'm guessing that he realized he couldn't save Mr Harvey but decided that he wanted the full story out in public and rub their noses in it good and hard.

Maybe he is right and his way is better - let it go to the jury, don't try to second-guess them.


Thanks Mrs WOAR

As many have pointed out, this has always gone on, maybe the Harvey verdict will make parents and their children behave a little better, for fear that the little bastards might really get killed.






14 comments:

rastus said...

"As many have pointed out, this has always gone on, maybe the Harvey verdict will make parents and their children behave a little better, for fear that the little bastards might really get killed."

I am not sure where your "always" starts. When I was going to school from up to 1949 this certainly was not going on. At Grammar school we would have been taken to the head for a severe thrashing and then simply been expelled.
In those days parents were responsible for the behaviour of their offspring whether they were present or not, and it should still be so.
If parents can not bring up their children to behave in a gentle and civil matter they should be prosecuted.

call me ishmael said...

Sorry, always, mr rastus, in my lifetime, and at my Direct Grant grammar school.

mongoose said...

As related elsewhere, at mine too, Mr Ishmael. However, it is the scale of the thing which has changed. Teenaged kids have always pushed the boundaries of what can be got away with but some of these poor kids are wild, fucking animals. I would never have dreamed of swearing at any of my lot for, as Mr Rastus says, my feet wouldn't have touched the ground on the way to the Head's study, although there was no corporal punishment.

The key deterrent was however that nobody's parents would never have taken their side against the school and we all knew it. If you really blew it, the Head would write to your parents - through the mail. The blasted letter would just turn up unannounced. (Never got one of those.)

call me ishmael said...

I would not dispute -am not in a position to dispute - the frequency of these events but I am aware of them, of specific events, fatal and near fatal, happening in the '60s, '70s and '80s at the hands of children and teenagers and I guess that the ones of which I was aware were not the only ones in the country; the cruelty of the playground is not a novelty to anthropologists or poets.

That this cruelty is amplified by new technologies - the slapping of strangers for recording on mobile phones, for instance - and encouraged by the general failure of deference as well as by slack or non-existent parenting has not been denied in my comment, merely not elaborated upon.

The orchestrated cruelty of groups of children - to each other or towards vulnerable adults - has been with us, on reflection, as I said, always and is something quite different from teenagers testing the boundaries. Didn't somebody write a book, Lord of The Flies?

mongoose said...

Well, indeed that is it, Mr Ishmael. The moral of this story, the moral of this song, is that it is the removal of social constraint and moral structure which uncovers and allows "man's essential illness" to peek its horrible head above the parapet. If there is no expectation - not sanction, mind - no societal common norm, then there is the failure of individual and then collective restraint and decency. "Kill the Beast! Kill the Beast!" And so Piggy falls and spreads his brains on the granite, as I remember it, along with the conch shell (the talking stick, the policeman's helmet, the scholar's gown). Authority, Piggy, morality, and his rules, die with Piggy and his holding of the line against the mob.

It ain't the latent savagery; it's the lack of respected authority and moral self-awareness that starts, that allows, one to avoid the truth of behaving like a bastard. The whole fucking world has become that savage neo-dog-eat-dog wilderness wherein choirboys become witless stormtroopers. Ruin through sloth. Ruin through cant. Ruin through just fucking lazy, plasma Judge Judy bollocks.

I can still just about, but only so, hear long-dead Fr Diamond saying "Hate the sin but love the sinner". Piggy knew.

A young Anglo-Irish catholic said...

Ah, fuck me, Mr I. Wasn't I listening to R4 late tonight. Some sarmy shit reading a barrister's jottings.

Was just a collection of anecdotes on how to steer guilty-as-sin 'clients' through the court and out the other side.

A bank and ID scam - scrubber saved by being dressed as respectable 40 something in court. Mused over the bank teller's excellent witness performance, but sowed enough doubt and he was humoured to have fooled the jury.

Same story with 'a glass in the face' bloke. Ordered to dress like his mother had done the shopping.

Ha fucking Ha.

Was 'bothered' though by telling client who was stealing from the till of pub he was running - after all he was promised bigger takings and wages - to plead guilty. Realised that jury was about to return not guilty.

Next sentence in book - next fucking sentence after detailing ways to fool jury - says 'corse I prefer the jury to the magistrates.

Jury fresh mind, unpaid, clear unsullied view. Magistrates cynical, mean-minded, too many previous cases in mind.

WTF is going on? Law 'profession' just engaged in games to prevent 'beyond reasonable doubt' and fuck the consequences.

Heard story of Mr Big man in Bentley recently. After years of taking the profits but keeping his hands clean, police finally catch the bugger outright.

Where were you...they ask and he lies. Trouble is, there are mini CCTV/ANPR cameras strapped to traffic lights all over the shop. Mr Big photographed in all the places he was not.

And the police have to hand all the evidence over, while Mr Big and his lawyer from Beyond, Reasonable and Doubt wonder how to wriggle out of the trap.

Fuck me, I can't live with this stuff going on.

richard said...

New term. In walks Mr Harvey who places a large dumb-bell on his desk.
Would pass-marks go up or down?

call me ishmael said...

Father Diamond, even if he was a nonce, was right in that.

I heard part of that programme on the mid morning slot, couldn't stand to listen to it, just heard the one about the publican, and then went out and chopped some wood. It's the adversarial system, I believe, at fault, the continental system, with an inquiring magistrate, seems more desireable, although le frog lawyer will be as rotten as the Brit or the Yank. Fuck me, you can live with all this stuff going on.

What a lovely thought. The pass marks would go up.

mongoose said...

I missed whatever prog it is to which you refer, Mr Ishmael. Fr D put his Austin 1100 or whatever into a lamp-post on the Lythalls Lane nearly forty years ago. There was a whisper of drink. He it was who lined me up to have my feet washed one Maundy Thursday by the Bishop of Birmingham - fortunately in church and me mum not five paces away to guard my cherubic backside.

You guess right however. English O-level 1976: Lord of the Flies, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, The War Poets and Something I have Forgotten. At least some of it was worth remembering.

call me ishmael said...

You didn't miss much, mr mongoose.

I knew Father Fell, a bit, was Diamond part of his gang?

mongoose said...

Didn't know Fell. Our lot were Diamond, Kilgarrif - who kept falling off mountains - and the fire-breathing, idiotic, zealot, bastard, Kemp. A taste for it, had Kemp. They were non-plastic paddies to a man though. Patriots, I am sure. We even had a wee convent across the road from the Prebytery. Meagre but our own, nomini tuo da gloriam etc. Just like being at home, so it was.

call me ishmael said...

This Father Fell

Patrick Fell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Father Patrick Fell (born 1940) is a Roman Catholic priest who was convicted in the 1970s of being a commander of a IRA active service unit. In June 1984 he was successful in his action to find the British Government guilty of violating the European Convention on Human Rights. The Government had denied the right of legal representation to prisoners facing internal prison disciplinary charges.[1][2]

Fell was born in England and was a convert to Catholicism before joining the Priesthood.[3] He was assistant priest at All Souls Church, Earlsdon, Coventry. [4] Fell never admitted IRA membership.

In April 1973, Fell was arrested with six others alleged to comprise an IRA unit planning a campaign in Coventry. He was tried at Birmingham Crown Court. The jury found three of the seven not guilty; the remaining four were all found guilty of criminal damage and conspiracy to commit arson. Fell and Frank Stagg, were found to be the unit’s commanding officers; Stagg was given a ten-year sentence and Fell twelve years. Thomas Gerald Rush was given seven years and Anthony Roland Lynch, who was also found guilty of possessing articles with intent to destroy property, namely nitric acid, balloons, wax and sodium chlorate, was given ten years.[5][6]
[edit] Imprisonment

Fell was eventually sent to the top security Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight. It was here that, following an incident, he was one of six republican prisoners charged with various offences including mutiny, incitement to mutiny and violence. Fell and the others were involved in a sitting down protest against the treatment of another prisoner.[7] As a result of attempts to break up the protest, both prisoners and prison warders received personal injuries. Fell was punished by the Prison's Board of Visitors and given 91 days solitary confinement and 570 days loss of remission.[8]

Fell's action was based on Articles 6 8, and 13 of the Convention.

On his release Fell served as a parish priest in rural Donegal.[9]

mongoose said...

Well into the fold it seems. Rome is it? Didn't he do well, a Shropshire lad called Kilgarrif. In truth, he wasn't the worst of his kind - very nearly an ordinary human.

call me ishmael said...

I will, mr mongoose, take that treacly valediction at face value, though, God knows, it's crying out for satirising, so it is.