Sunday 9 February 2003

Political correctness under attack .....

A lawyer tells the truth:
In an article for the political magazine Holyrood out this week, Duff (a senior defence lawyer) says the Crown Office is "running scared of ever refraining from prosecution in alleged rape cases, leading to the present situation where hopeless prosecutions are mounted, resulting in inevitable acquittals and the skewing of statistics, adding yet more fuel to the fire of controversy".

On racist offences, he suggests the reforms are likely to fail the country’s black population.

"So rigid is the instruction given to formerly independent lawyers that they can never, without Crown Office permission, drop the most trivial of so-called racist offences in a plea bargain process," he says.

It's no surprise that the Crown Office "condemned Duff’s outburst as 'reactionary' ".