Witness anonymity: a professional view

It is clear that some (such as Harry Haddock at Nation of Shopkeepers) share my view of the witness anonymity issue.

Others do not; or at least do not share it in its entirety.

One of those is Nightjack, who is a real detective and knows what he is on about.

He says: “The result of this finding is a clear message to organised crime groups, gangs and local thugs. Quite simply, the more lethal your retribution for grassing, the more murderous your reputation for dealing with witnesses, the more likely you can get away with crime because people will be too scared to ever give evidence against you.”

But then balances it with: “All I will say is, in future, it may be hard for the jury to put entirely out of their minds that the chap/s in the dock are very bad people who are scarey killers when all the main witnesses are behind screens with their voices altered to sound like a Dalek and people are calling them Mr X, Mr Y and Miss Z.”

There are two points, one of principle, and one of pragmatism. If we are to live in a country with a respectable rule of law (rather than merely an efficient police force), then the point of principle must be maintained.

On the other hand, if we are to deal with what seems to be a substantial gangster problem, we must address the point of pragmatism.

Nightjack is doubtless right that a witness protection scheme under the present government is more likely to consist of “a hard to let council flat over a chippy, next to an amphet dealer with lousy schools and never seeing your friends and family again” than anything better. However, I wonder whether this could be improved, and whether, if it were, he might be prepared to consider it a valid alternative to new legislation.

The problem of witness intimidation is a real one and I would prefer to see a proper scheme to defeat it than legislation which removes a basic principle ‘in exceptional cases’, which, given the usual tendency towards mission-creep, will almost certainly become the rule rather than the exception.

We now have local authorities using anti-terrorist surveillance powers against people who put their bins out on the wrong day. How long will it be, given a new ‘right’ to witness anonymity, before people with the wrong political or cultural views (those who have failed to return the lawnmower; business rivals; or merely people of whose hairstyles we disapprove) are dragged off the street on the basis of an anonymous ‘complaint from the public’, convicted in some security-theatre show-trial of a serious offence on the sole basis of anonymous ‘witnesses’, and banged up? Didn’t the ’supergrass’ episode contain any lessons?

I am aware that it was quite wrong for the American police to ambush Bonnie and Clyde without so much as a warning, but if there’s no other way of dealing with armed gangsters I’d prefer to run the risk of this sort of thing happening occasionally than of the legal system becoming for all time an unchallengeable rubber-stamp for anyone malicious enough to resort to delation. Enough damage has been done already with all this ‘paedophile’ and ‘terrorist’ stuff.