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Stop Press (seems appropriate): I shall comment on the sentences but am travelling this weekend so not just yet ...
You cannot influence a judge, in-house newspaper lawyers of my experience would say, so don't worry too much about what you write concerning a no-jury trial or during the period between a jury’s conviction and sentence.
Does that mean it is safe to comment on what should and not happen when Mr Justice Saunders comes to pass sentence on Andy Coulson and others on Friday? Once, I would have said “of course”.
In the midst of full-scale attacks - as it has come to seem - on the press, especially newspapers and people working for them, by police, politicians, prosecutors, the judiciary and social media trolls, I am a lot less sure.
And where, we may ask, were the in-house lawyers and what were they saying when things were going on at the News of the World, and on a lesser scale elsewhere, to enrage society and make me – a journalist for 47 years – squirm?
Did none of them cry foul, or at least ask about the provenance of the stories being published?
But in the knowledge that post-Leveson frenzy has pushed the goalposts a little out of position, I shall be very cautious.
Firstly, though, I do not believe Coulson or his co-accused – Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, James Weatherup or the former private investigator Glenn Mulcaire – are necessarily bad people. They have done bad things, but that is not the same.
Timothy Langdale QC has said in mitigation for Coulson that he is “a thoroughly decent person”. On the other hand, the prosecuting counsel, Andrew Edis QC, described those awaiting sentence as men who “utterly corrupted that newspaper which became at the highest level a thoroughly criminal enterprise”. It is for the judge to decide which of the two, if either, was going several miles over the top, and to strike a proper balance that reflects the interests of justice and basic fairness to the defendants.
As I have indicated, even a thoroughly decent person can suffer a lapse of decency, or the thoroughness of his decency. Martin Hickman, who is publishing the Peter Jukes book on the Coulson/Brooks etc trial, Beyond Contempt - which I have pre-ordered - is less even-handed, tweeting: "What do you call a man who lied through his teeth at a criminal trial for eight months? His lawyer: 'Thoroughly decent'."
I remember a law student of impeccable previous character going to jail for longer than the maximum two-year term faced by these ex-NoW employees. She had been to an all-night rave and fallen asleep at the wheel when driving home. Four others who had also been at the rave died in the resulting accident and this “thoroughly decent” student was therefore guilty of serious offences despite having had not an ounce of criminal intent.
Had her car run into a tree instead of hitting an oncoming vehicle that then collided with the one behind her, causing the fatalities, we might have been mourning her death, regretting her serious injury or welcoming her escape from either, rather than tossing her into jail. But criminal law required her to be punished severely all the same - and it still wasn't enough for every grieving relative.
Tabloid justice is the phrase that springs to mind, and how often have the popular papers applied it themselves, demanding harsh treatment of offenders, questioning leniency, persecuting groups of people or individuals of whom they disapproved? So Coulson and company cannot complain about the fate now staring them in the face.
What they have admitted doing or - or convicted of doing in Coulson's case - has brought shame on my trade of journalism.
I despise what happened at, or on behalf of, the NoW and elsewhere – elsewhere happening to include some bluechip companies which, to no great surprise, have yet to attract the least attention from authorities with tens of millions of pounds to spare on pursuing the hated journalist.
Hacking people’s phones was a rotten practice, completely at odds with anything I have ever regarded as ethical conduct.
The Guardian likes to be acclaimed for its role in exposing the scandal; it presumably shares the view of its former executive editor, David Leigh, who asserted at Leveson that hacking was legitimate provided the target is rotten, too (in his case, a suspected arms dealer).
I happen to disagree with Leigh when he tries to set himself up as morally superior; the "tittle-tattle" gleaned from hacking celebs' phones may produce the revenue that facilitates costly investigative journalism that is genuinely in the public interest. Cue an interesting ethical argument, but the truth is that I would have sworn as loudly at Leigh if asked to hack a phone as I would at a NoW news editor demanding that the same means be used to obtain a footballer’s wife story. Interestingly, the law makes no distinction even if the CPS does.
Victims of hacking have been able to claim generous compensation. I happen to know journalists who were hacked and at least one of them chose not to seek his windfall. But the hacking was done on an industrial scale and I do not pretend that non-luvvies were spared. Milly Dowler is a name that will haunt every decent journalist for years to come (this is no place to explore the nuances of what was done, and why, save to say that some exist).
So we have a disgusting breach of ethics, indeed of decency. Forgive me for seeing more than a hint of truth in the claims of the accused to have been largely unaware they were breaking the criminal law. But ignorance of the law, we are always told, is no defence and I suppose that applies absolutely, namely to little-used or obscure laws as well as to obvious ones.
And forgive me for continuing to feel that if you threw a Leveson and £30m+ of police time at any trade or profession in the land, you'd come up with a few bad apples and probably a few criminal convictions.
In the hacking case, I would have settled for a proper prosecution of News International for corporate criminality, for that is what we are really talking about, and for seeing rogues drummed out of journalism. But these men are almost certainly going to jail and, in the context of all else that goes on in the name of justice, this is probably not something we should regret too deeply; I was angrier at the time about the law student.
It is clear that I am out on a limb in arguing that the reprehensible goings-on at the NoW smacked more of civil than criminal misconduct, at any rate at a personal level. But misconduct has been proved or admitted to the satisfaction of the criminal justice process and no one is under any illusion about what happens next.
I do not envy Mr Justice Saunders as he prepares to do his duty, or faire son travail as they say here in France, beyond his jurisdiction.
His job is to take full account of all the issues and to ignore the clamour for blood from les tricoteuses of public opinion; he has already felt the need to emphasise that the maximum penalties available in this case may not meet public expectation.
But as he reflects on these matters, I am left wishing he had the power to punish not only these five men but the company on whose behalf they acted as they did, along with every Facebook and Twitter idiot who has second-guessed, often in the most odious terms, the Not Guilty verdicts of last week.
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