Wednesday 4 August 2010

IAN HUNTLEY

 The Home Office or whatever it is now called regularly laments the fact that people can enter British prisons clean and exit a short time later with a drug problem. Maybe Mrs New Boots and Panties, the current Home Seckatry,  will  reflect that the most likely cause of so much gear getting into what is so expensively maintained as secure accommodation is the entrepreneurship displayed  by  Prison Officer Screw and his fellow Lodge members. 

Yes, the very thought of it, another thin blue line, only they're mostly fat fuckers, importing dope and smack to the jails, and porn and phones; it's unthinkable really, but how else do you explain the prevalence of all sorts of drugs and other contraband  in the nick? There can't always be, in every nick,  some weasely but criminally brilliant drug baron with dozens of trained hussies delivering gear via lingering kises with inmates. Can there?  Come on, now, if these people were such logistical masterminds they wouldn't have been nicked in the first place, not by our lazy bastard coppers.

Serial convicts, among the least well educated people in the country, how, week-in, week-out, do they maintain industrial-level  supplies of drugs, evading sniffer dogs and CCTV and intimate body searches and cell searches? What is their secret, that they can bamboozle the entire resources of the Home Office and walk around the nick blasted out of their minds? We should ask the Prison Officers Association.

 And while we're at it we should ask them what  they think they're up to with Ian Huntley? Huntley is actually pretty small beer as nonces go, made more infamous by skymadeupnewsandfilth's salacious exploitation of the images of his child victims  but regardless of the gravity of his offences it is intolerable for a civilised society to  suggest that he should for every second of his life live in fear of vigilanteism, that those charged with his security are somehow properly remedying the Court's failure to hang him by conniving at his wounding and that he should meekly accept his mistreatment, take his  serial knifings like a man. The idea that convicts, rather than courts, should, in certain cases  be permitted to, or cannot be prevented from dispensing mob justice is as fatuous as it is repellent, it is, in short, Nazi shit.

There is absolutely no excuse for Ian Huntley being slashed by another con, none whatever, that he has been attacked several times is an absolute scandal and his landing officers and their seniors should have had their arses kicked and be sent out into our Brave New Austere World, an assistant governor should have been sacked and questions asked in the House about what the fuck kind of prison system are we running here, not because we approve of Huntley's previous conduct but because we don't.

23 comments:

Mike said...

Meanwhile, the system bends over backwards for the Bulger killers, particularly Venables.

call me ishmael said...

As it should, mr mike, they were children, too, as much sinned against as sinning, neglected, unloved and corrupted by the very media forces which shrieked so loudly for their punishment.

Mike said...

Mr I: I'm not saying the Bulger killers should be mis-treated, merely pointing at double standards, particularly with Venables whose latest crimes were at the age of 26 (?). Why should he be so anonymised, whereas Huntley is openly persued?

banned said...

Spot on Mr Ishmael, there is something very wrong with a system when the scary thing is not that system but what it allows other prisoners to get away with.

I've never understood why there are few, if any, prosecutions for assault made by prisoners or do prisons have some form of Crown Immunity for the crimes of their staff and inmates?

Anonymous said...

i have often wondered?http://www.justjustice.org/index.html

PT Barnum said...

Bravo, Mr I. And timely. This happened on Sunday.

"A prisoner has been arrested on suspicion of murder over an attack on a fellow inmate in one of the UK's safest prisons.

Robert Coello, from Berkshire, serving life for raping a child, died on Sunday after he was discovered in his cell at Grendon Prison and taken to hospital.

The BBC understands that he suffered head injuries after being stamped on.

Thames Valley Police arrested a 25-year-old man who has since been bailed back to the prison."

Anonymous said...

What do do expect? Ex supermarket employee well versed in shelf replenishing not well versed in the needs of long term inmates. You get what you pay for.

Dick the Prick said...

Completely agree Mr Ishmael but was told a few years ago that Screws & their seniors are under instruction to not only turn a blind eye to smack but encourage it as it helps to keep them sedated. I'm sure temazipam works quite well, too.

Woman on a Raft said...

Anon's link is interesting but not all that much help. In Huntley's case, there are very good reasons for accepting the jury's conclusion that the girls died in his bathroom and the cause of death was him.

An example of the inconsistencies in the article is the assertion that Huntley was in fact an inventive studious chap, a James Dyson in waiting. The article asserts that he invented an electrostatic cleaning head and supports this assertion by claiming that Huntley was granted a patent.

In fact, Wiki has had to delete this assertion several times for lack of substantiation on the patents database. Cache version

Dustatic 101

"There is/was no such product on the market that I can find, no evidence of a patent application being filed by child murderer Ian Huntley, no evidence of a granted patent in that name, and no ref for the supposed quotation from the 'Chairman of the British Cleaning Council'. The only cite is to a book about the case - it is extremely doubtful that a 'British invention' of such supposed weight would have escaped the attention of the media, as the man is a well-known child killer. The only references to Huntley and this invention route back to the WP article on a vacuum company; editors repeatedly removed this content from the Huntley article and the Numatic article, so the editor appears to have made a new page for these paragraphs Little grape (talk) 21:22, 5 July 2009 (UTC)"

"Seems to me this is another person, Ian Michael Huntley being inventor with 3 cleaning-related patents to be found in the GB esp@cenet of EPO patent database search service. Ian Kevin Huntley mentioned in the Sohan murders -related article has 0 hits in the same database. Casimirpo (talk) 18:52, 12 July 2009 (UTC)"

Woman on a Raft said...

Idea! Let Huntley bring the case, but against the Prison Officers' Association. Taxpayers should not have fork out on behalf of officers who don't do the job for which they have already been paid.

We'll soon see if this changes the POA's attitude.

call me ishmael said...

Now, that is an idea, make the screws concentrate on their jobs, make a change.

In passing, young CallHimDave, poncing about for Michael Howard at the Home Office, was charged with explaining to the prison authorities that Mrs Michael, former model, Sandra, felt that prisoners were too well fed, that bread and water might aid their rehabilitation. Howard's officials regretted that instead of listening to experts he preferred the counsel of "young public school gentlemen." He must be thrilled, presently, as the nation is lectured-to by such, horrible fucking bastard.

mongoose said...

I think that I could take mild issue, Mr Ishmael, with your generous appraisal of Huntley's noncehood but let's not quibble. It looked, did it not, like error and horror noncehood rather than Bradyesque evil beyond imagination.

Even those who are hangers and floggers have to accept that we no longer embrace the cruel and unusual. It is over now. No shooting parties for us. Let us leave that to our savage cousins across the water. Our nonce has been nabbed and must now do his time. We have no more right to allow others to slash and stab him as we have to slash or stab him ourselves. I would even imagine, although I know not what the law is, that the state has a duty of care to protect the vile bastard. Do not nonces get to live on the nonce wing? There they are safe from the holier-than-thou fuckwitted justice of the ordinary, honest criminal. Do your time, Mr H, and consider every minute what you have done.

And what of Mr Huntley's maid? What was she all about then? And what life does she now lead?

call me ishmael said...

In the annals of noncing, mr m, Huntley is small beer, as you say, not even on the same spectrum as Brady and Hindley, and as far as we know, only the one offence.

Now, I'm liberal but to a degree, and while I do think there is a place for punishment I think there is a greater need for prevention and that we will only approach the latter by regulating the former in such a manner as we gain some understanding of the causes which motivate noncing in the first place, that what we need is far more places like HMP Grendon Underwood in which to swim the dark waters of NonceMind; either we do that or we just resign ourselves to calling poste facto for the guts of future offenders -skymadeuonewsandfilth won't keep our children safe, now, will it? We need to fathom the unfathomable and prevent it swamping us. There, couldn't have put it better myself.


As for capital punishment being banished from these shores, well, I envy your optimism. Do you not suppose that the front bench of braying public schoolboys might not find a reason or two for such sport?

Woman on a Raft said...

For Mr Mongoose

The police were convinced she was more aware of the crime than she maintained, but were unable to substantiate the more serious charges before a jury. She was given a 3 year prison sentence.

The CPS built a tranche of minor cases in 2004 in an effort to prevent her release.

http://www.cps.gov.uk
/news/press_releases/113_04/

Carr admitted all the charges and it was ruled that there was no public interest served by her continued imprisonment. She completed the latter part of the penalty outside.

However, it proved to be (predictably) hard to integrate her back in to society, given her notoriety. She therefore is covered by various media gagging orders.

Carr is thought to have planned to marry in 2008 and may have to get further orders to cover any children she may have.

Channel 4 illustrated the problem with the documentary "Being Maxine Carr" which was not about her but about a number of people who have been 'mistaken' for her.

It is available online

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/being-maxine-carr/4od

In one episode, if I've recalled correctly, there is an interview with a police officer who expresses the frustration of going round to someone's house with a victim's full biography exposed, photographs which clearly show she is nothing whatever like Carr, and trying to get the householder to comprehend that they've got it all arse uppards and the woman next door is not Maxine Carr, and even if she was, they still can't chuck bricks through the window.

The householder just won't accept it and says something to the camera such as "Oh, they would say that".

BTW, I've just noticed that Dr Nathaniel Carey examined and gave his opinion on the bodies. The CPS were willing to accept his word for it then, but not when he did the second examination on the late Ian Tomlinson.

call me ishmael said...

........if you will forgive the double negative

mongoose said...

Couldn't not forgive it, Mr Ishmael.

Thank-you, Mrs WOAR. I sort of thought - or maybe I sort of hoped to think that maybe it would be less horrible if it were true that - she was a bullied, cowed, become-a- weakling, made to cover up, not active etc. A lesser victim not entirely innocent but much, much less grossly guilty. Ah, bless. We didn't want another Hindley, did we? Women don't do that stuff. No, no, no. Hands over ears, hands over ears.

We will now never know. Even that might be a good thing.

call me ishmael said...

Elsewhere, debates rage about the contemporary feminist preoccupation with the sex industry and with male violence towards women as opposed to there being a wider, feminist, attack on all the sins of what for want of a better word we can call Capitalism.

I have always been intensely irritated by GayLib or BlackLib or FemLib or GingerLib or FatLib or whatever the noisy minority happens to be - and aren't we all, anyway, ultimately our own, silently screaming, frightened minority, hurtling down Life's cruel one-way street? - believing that there is only one campaign, one cause, one war, that of Us against Them and that fucking about with specialist pleading does more harm than good.

Even so, I had inclined to the view that Maxine Carr was bullied and cowed; at the time thinking that either she had no choice, WAS coerced or was simply doing that Stand By Your Man stuff, in Sickness And In Health. I was happy, indeed, glowed with self-satisfaction, defending her reputation, just a poor woman, oppressed. Not so sure, now.

It can be argued, you see, that Rosemary West was Fred's creature. It was he who originated the videotaped interracial sex sessions, he took no part, taping them through spyholes. But you can also argue that he was hers; by all accounts she participated willingly in conduct at first unconventional but subsequently barbaric. Seems that each was egged-on by the other's appetites, the serial offences could not have occurred without the participation of both and yet she and her team were happy to run the poor woman defence. Can't, of course, read too much into that - who, facing a dozen life sentences, wouldn't? But I think it has been a touchstone, a a venerated part of courtroom grammar - He made me do it, and that it may, in truth, have been her, made him do it. As it may have been Maxine, teaching assistant, who fired-up Ian.

I was disgusted by the Vicar of Soham and by most of the prurient Holly and Jessica media shitstorm and have, consequently, read nothing of those crimes. I wouldn't give a flying fuck for anything the police or the CPS said regarding Maxine's complicity/sanctioning/condoning/assisting in the offence but neither would I remove my hands, mr mongoose, from my eyes and ears.

And when you get to the bottom you go back to the top. We live in a culture driven mad with lust, acquainted, familiar, via skymadeupnewsandfilth, with deviances more cruel than normal humanity might imagine for itself - the boys who killed James Bulger, poor, poor lads, were versed in, impregnated with perversion and degradation that I didn't know about until my forties, the free market of filth has stolen our children and colonised our marital beds. I always used to think that the phrase: A lady drops her Virtue with her Petticoat had to have been coined by a man, these dogging days, I am not so sure.

Woman on a Raft said...

To be clear: Carr was definitively ruled out of the murder. She was in Grimsby and could be proved to be so. That was why her alibi for Huntley could be shown to be false. Nobody, not even the police, have ever suggested Carr in anyway commissioned the offence. She may, however, have had an argument on the phone and it has been suggested that Huntley may have struck at the girls precisely because he knew them to be Carr's little friends. They were willing to go in to the house because they were deceived in to thinking she was there. She was not.

However, the police believed that on her return as the search began, she guessed what he had done and deliberately obscured it, helping with the further cleaning of the place. Carr's crimes hinged around around what she knew.

Carr maintained that she thought she was cleaning up in her usual obsessive fashion, and that she had an idea that Huntley, in a huff because she had gone to visit her mother, had taken a woman back to the house.

Huntley was insecure, immature, controlling and posessive. However, Carr may have been unaware of how inappropriately young his previous girlfriends had been.

One difficulty the police faced was that Carr was the cleverer of the two. Despite her lack of qualifications and giddy personality, she managed to obtain a stream of jobs while doing low-level benefits fraud. Although the local primary school had not employed Carr permanently because they regarded her personality as not a good fit for the job of classroom assistant, she had held down that job successfully during the temporary contract. They hadn't dismissed her.

She was bright enough to put two and two together, but she apparently did not. Oppressed? No, but then again, not someone with a place of their own and a secure income. Not someone with such prospects that she would rule out the sulky Huntley as a suitor.

The jury accepted that while Carr lied by giving a false alibi, there was no evidence that she was a knowing party to the concealment of the crime.

....

What exactly did Tim Alban Jones say which enraged you, Mr Ishmael?

call me ishmael said...

It is what he didn't say, Mrs woar, what he is paid to say, what his ministry is based upon, what, loving his media profile, he balked at saying; what we, Godless heathen bastards, say here constantly, that we must, if we would be mended, love the sinner but hate the sin.

If there is a Soham parishioner more in need of God's forgiveness than Ian Huntley, it must be Vicar Tim, himself. Still, no OBEs in doing the work of the Lord, eh?

Luke 6:35-38;42
But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. "Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." ... How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

Woman on a Raft said...

As I haven't made a trip out to check what Alban-Jones is saying in his pulpit since the conviction in December 2003, I can only note the following:

In the two weeks before the bodies were discovered, the only thing AJ could say was "there-there" and hope they'd turn up alive, perhaps after being imprisoned for a while. As Soham is in the middle of an agricultural landscape cris-crossed by drains and rivers, there was a possibility that they had been unwary and had an accident, although it meant going quite a way without telling anyone.

To have mentioned a sinner or a sin at that point was not T-AJ's business. Nobody even knew if there was a sin, let alone a sinner.

Following the discovery of items in the gym, Huntley and Carr were arrested as the police knew by then that Carr was lying. In a conveniently (suspiciously?) close order, the bodies were discovered. Charges were revised.

AJ could say nothing about sins or sinners or forgiveness then because that would have been instantly picked up and interpreted as prejudicial to the trial. You don't forgive someone until the jury have decided if he's guilty. Technically, the media would have been violating the concept of sub judice, but A-J had to be careful because the prosecution were ready for a challenge on the basis that Huntley couldn't be tried at all due to the impossiblity of finding an unprejudiced jury.

The day after the trial verdict TA-J was approached for an opinion and said that he thought the the time to address the issue of forgiveness had not yet arrived; i.e. it would, but he wasn't going to be hassled in to giving a splash headline to a journalist.

So 2004 was the earliest he could have preached a sermon based on Luke. He may well have done so; the people to ask would be the parishoners.

Considering the scale of the cluster-fuck which descended on a country vicar - and this was a global story which engaged satellite trucks from every major news gatherer in the world - he managed it remarkably well, protecting his flock. It was a Diana-sized story in the boondocks.

call me ishmael said...

You can come and defend me, Mrs woar, if I ever need it.

My reading of it, however, is less charitable. I thought he milked it shamefully for all it was worth, whilst ignoring his obligation to preach forgiveness, regardless of court protocols, none of which yet preclude the preaching of the Gospel, he could - and should - have done so in a general sense and i reject entirely that he was circumscribed in any way other than by personal cowardice.

And why DID the cluster fuck descend on a country vicar, it doesn't usually, when these events occur, does it? Do country vicars live in fear of child murder making them global headliners, does Rupert Murdoch instruct his global stringers - Whatever you do, get hold of the Vicar - of course not, Jones courted the attention, cast himself as Good Shepherd. Even though he's a bad one.

Woman on a Raft said...

These events do not normally occur. Cheerful ten year olds from stable families do not vanish, as a pair, on a warm August Sunday teatime (just about now, 4 August it was), a little while after having a happy snap taken, somewhere between having bought sweets in the sports centre and the few hundred yards back to their own front door.

Country vicars don't expect a media storm of that proportion but they do regularly deal with media coverage of irregular deaths, usually tragic road accidents but sometimes as a result of violent crime. Communication with the media is part of their modern job.

...

Soham is a straggly village on the edge of Fenland pop. 9,000. It has a small branch library and two small supermarkets (one is a Co-op) and a petrol station at the far end of town. It has one main road from tip to tail, the rest are residential streets which lay, like fish bones, connecting the village to the bypass and wider fen. There is a network of footpaths. The school is remarkably open; it is not fenced; or at least, not heavily. Footpaths run through it. St Andrews primary school, Soham secondary school and sports centre cluster on one site. About five minutes down the road is the parish church.

The 10 year old girls attended St Andrews CE primary school i.e. the school associated with St Andrews, the parish church, of which TA-J is a governor. The parents were parishoners. It was to be expected that TA-J would be asked to act as a spokesman. He couldn't avoid it - his church is bang in the middle and it was his churchyard the flowers were being sent to, whether he wanted it or not. It was his school the girls went to. It was his school which employed Carr temporarily and that was why they felt safe going in to the house of a man they might otherwise have classified as "stranger".

The police were trying to search the area and needed to corale the satellite trucks somewhere, and they didn't want the school invaded or journalists clodhoppering all over everything. They loaded what they could in to the central area, a small park, more of a playing field really, just behind the church. It's a village high street; there was no where else for the circus to go. Even if the vicar had wanted to keep out of it, he could not because banging on the vicar's door and trying to get a quote is the job which journalists do.

The story also took place inside the season which is thinner for news hunters. The clusterfuck descended because there was a chance of a happy ending. That did not happen but the bigger, sadder story did. The fact that Huntley was a school caretaker was irrelevant, although people can't grasp that, but it drove the coverage as did that picture and the fact that they vanished together.

call me ishmael said...

Ay-Jay's governorship of a school is one of those accoutrements, like opening a fete, he probably has scores of them, people like him do, pretending to a frantic industry actually unkwon to him, but entirely incidental to his assumedly vocational purpose, which is teaching the Gospel of Christ and spreading the Good News of forgiveness and salvation - not wearing a forest of trendy, managerialist/PR hats like an all-singing, all-dancing Blair-speaking nonentity. He had a unique opportunity, during these grim events, to do that, to honour his vocation, to set faith apart from PR, to illuminate the central, essential tenet of his faith and instead he dribbled soundbites about community, the worthless, slef-serving cowardly prick. He and - from your recent apologia of pragmatism - I suspect you, would have decried the Lord, himself, overturning the tables of the money-changers' in the Temple; Oh Fuck me, Jesus, best not, the meeja are here. Have to do what they want. And think of your career, these next two thousand years, can't go upsetting the press, now, or the status quo, there's a good Saviour.

I have no knowledge of the good folk of Soham but I doubt that many send their kids to a C of E school because of their faith, I doubt that more than ten per cent of them attend church regularly and I suspect that most of them who did at this time were prompted by whatever it is which prompted people to weep at the death of Diana Spenceer, that is to say something deeply unpleasant, un-English and un-Christian and shame on Ay-Jay for wallowing in his suddenly increased flock instead of damning them for griefmedia-junky hypocrites, a sin perhaps rather too close to home for him to scourge.

As for him being an unwilling spokesman, well, mrs woar, if you believe that, you'll believe anything - and you won't, usually.

Look into, each, his own heart, that should have been his message. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, that should have been his message; instead, we witnessed Now Mr Murdoch, how may I suck your cock - in a truly Christian community news agenda managing sense, of course.

I have mentioned before that I think the Devil keeps an especially incandescent place for clergypersons; Ay-Jay OBE is one of those who at least keeps that belief alive, however dismally he fails in his Christian purpose. Amen.