Treated with contempt

From Cameron McPhail.

FOR the first time in my life, I was summonsed to appear before the Magistrate’s Court. It was over a disputed £40 parking ticket issued by our Parking Politsia.

Of course, after an embarrassing Reverse Ferret, St Helier’s finest dropped the charges and I was released a free man able to tell my painful story to an expectant Island.

In the face of a mountain of evidence, manifest incompetence and the somewhat compelling defence that it was not even my car, I was still asked by the court how I pleaded to the charge levelled against me. On my reply of ‘not guilty’, the Magistrate deemed that the case should go to trial.

A trial over a mal-administered parking ticket? For a moment, but only a moment, I felt some sympathy for Solzhenitsyn Syvret and his perennial court room battles.

Thankfully, but only after some McEnroe-esque cries of ‘you cannot be serious’, common sense prevailed. After a short huddle, the charge was dropped with the exasperated Magistrate declaring that the case should never have been brought to court.

Perplexingly, almost exactly the same charade was played out by the next noble citizen to appear before the Bench. He too was able to produce evidence that he was obviously not guilty and once again the Crown’s case collapsed and a second trial was avoided. In the light of such experiences, the question becomes just how much time and money is being wasted on a daily basis on such trivial and vacuous lost causes?

Of course, the inconsequential nature of my ‘pile driver to crack a peanut’ court experience need not detain or distress the busy reader. However, some of my wider observations may cause some pause for thought. There is little doubt that panjandrum central and its various new court rooms are impressive, but the same cannot be said of the associated customer experience.

My first encounter with the system was with one of these seemingly ubiquitous security guards masquerading as receptionists, who seem to populate many of the States’ buildings. Muddled directions were all that this vital cog in the wheel could manage before his eyes glossed over with the effort involved.

Upstairs I fared no better with the court usher, where the closest he could get to McPhail on his list of those summonsed was Falle. In the court room itself further disappointment was to follow when one bored legal official could not even be bothered to stifle her rolling yawns.

Of course, this lack of respect for others in the court room all changed when the apotheotic Magistrate took up his position perched high above us mere mortals.

Enough of my subversive observations about the machinations of the court, when actually the most noteworthy aspect of my afternoon was that, of the 30 or so alleged perpetrators summonsed to appear in court, only four turned up. In other words some three quarters of those asked to attend did not even show and warrants for their arrest had to be issued.

To my mind this is extraordinary and makes one question just what sort of curate’s egg this Island is becoming when the majority of those summonsed feel able to ignore a court order and so treat the legal process with impunity. This type of behaviour certainly has a whiff of civil disobedience about it but no doubt the police, once again at some considerable cost, are tracking down what must be in total several hundred vulpine miscreants.

Unless, that is, the police are well aware that many of the summonses will not hold water if ever tested in court and these arrest warrants should be quietly put to the bottom of their burgeoning ‘to do’ pile.

One final jab at the state apparatus: aside from several examples of questionable English, my summons did not even spell ‘Magistrate’s’ correctly. Perhaps this should be a crime in itself. Off with their heads would seem a fitting sentence.