The Ability to Kill Read Online Free PDF Page B

defence plea that there was no case to answer might very well succeed. However, it was rejected and the trial dragged on. By the end of the second week, I knew the Old Bailey snack-bar from the Cambridge sausage to the sardines on toast, from the table that wobbled as I wrote to the chair with the cigarette burn on the leatherette seat. I had also learned, too well, that having to go on writing about a trial as if the outcome were still in doubt, when, in your own mind, no such doubt exists, is one of the most exhausting journalistic exercises there is; and also the most demoralising.
    I came to hate the teletype machines. Soon after four in the afternoon, I would reach the office and begin to bellow the day’s piece into the ear of a man who was one of the fastest and most accurate typists I have ever encountered. Another man hovered beside me. It was his job to get the pages to the teletype operators as they were finished. Unless I snatched them from the typist first, they would be gone before I could read them through. Once, while on page two, I decided to transfer a paragraph to page one and was told that it could not be done;page one had already reached Chicago. After that, I held on to the pages until messages began to come from the machines saying that New York was becoming impatient.
    At the conclusion of the trial, the judge’s last act was to thank the jury for their patience and to free them from any future liability for jury service.
    He did not, of course, see fit to thank the acquitted man for
his
patience during the proceedings, nor to express any regret for errors of judgment made by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Yet, the jury had only been inconvenienced. The sufferings of the innocent man in the dock had included, aside from the mental anguish of the entire ordeal, several months’ imprisonment, exposure to newspaper publicity of the worst kind (French newspapers had referred to him, before the trial which proclaimed his innocence, as every kind of villain) and the destruction of his career. Had the legal costs of his defence not been borne by a professional association of which he happened to be a member, he would have been ruined financially as well.
    Nobody supposes that a legal system which presumes innocence until guilt is proved can function without sometimes causing the innocent to suffer arrest and trial; and nobody supposes that prosecutors and policemen enjoy those occasions, which can make the lawyers look careless, the police incompetent (or dishonest) and which may seem to have wasted a court’s valuable time. It is even understandable that the officials concerned with an unsuccessful prosecution should try to preserve their postures of infallibility by referring to the acquitted person as ‘lucky,’ rather than as innocent. What does seem monstrously unfair, however, is that the innocents should so often be required to pay cash for their ‘luck’.
    In law an indictment for a criminal offence is, in some contexts, referred to as a ‘libel.’ It is just that. But there are libelsand libels. The private person who loses a libel action usually has to pay his victim’s legal costs as well as the assessed amount of damages. The Crown does not have to pay either. The Crown may libel with impunity and shrug off all the consequences of its mistakes. The person tried and found not guilty must be content with his bare acquittal, no matter what it may have cost him. Unless he was already a poor man before the trial (and so entitled to legal aid), he will almost certainly be a poorer man after it.
    True, he may be able to recoup his loss by selling an account of his misfortunes to a newspaper; but, generally, innocence is a less newsworthy subject than guilt. There may be more financial hope for him if he resorts to another legal remedy, that of libel suits (oddly enough) brought, not against the Director of Public Prosecutions or the police, who are securely privileged, but against the