Confronting your accusers

Part of due process is being able to confront your accuser(s). Apparently that isn’t part of the law in some cases in the UK and this guy spent five years in jail before they figured out the accuser was a liar:

A father who served five years in jail for sexually assaulting a woman had his conviction quashed yesterday after new evidence suggested his victim was a liar who inflicted her own injuries.

Warren Blackwell, 36, embraced his wife, Tanya, outside the Court of Appeal in London, saying he would always love her for standing by him. But the ordeal made him “a very angry man indeed”.

“It took the police and the justice system nine months to convict me of a crime that not only did I not commit, but a crime that never even took place,” he said in a statement read by his solicitor.

And not only that she still can’t be named:

“It has taken almost seven years to clear my name.” The court was told that the woman, who cannot be named, had made strikingly similar claims of other sex attacks, had an ability to lie and a possible propensity to self harm.

Mr Justice Tugendhat said that when Parliament passed the law granting lifetime anon-ymity to complainants in sex cases it did not contemplate someone acting as she had.

“There may, in future, be another case in which she makes allegations against another man.”

We have a Constitution which was designed to prevent these sort of abuses by government. It’s too bad our government doesn’t abide by it. But at least it gives us a clear goal in our pursuit of regaining our freedom.

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