I'm a little pressed for time this morning so I thought I'd get the bare bones of this post up and come back later to fill in the blanks and the links and pictures.
What Happenned Yesterday?
What "bad news" did Gordon need hidden?
I shouldn't be thinking those things, but the fact is I am. And here's why.
A lifetime ago, when water companies were utilities, summers were long and hot, and sex was a new experience (for me, anyway), I remember a news story making headlines in a way that it wouldn't these days because it's all too familiar a tale. A girl of about eleven went to the corner shop for her mother and never came back. I have a suspicion from the time that she was sent off to the shop to buy her mum a packet of fags (an errand I myself was often sent on for my grandmother when I was eleven) but of course in today's tobacco-phobic times that snippet of information would have to be neatly censured from the public records. I remember the news of her body being found a few days later and I remember the trial and conviction of some chap or other a while later but these things blur together.
And later, much later, as a fully trained biochemist with friends and former work colleagues in the forensic science service I recalled the case for all the wrong reasons. The same sort of reasons one remembers a woman murdered at the roadside by a mad axeman and the lorry driver wrongly convicted of doing it because he had the same wierd blood group, the same reason one remembers the birmingham six sentenced for the terrorist activity of playing cards on the Dublin To Holyhead Ferry. A slight scientific cock-up. Or in this case cock-not-up. Or not firing, anyway.
Because the story broke that the man arrested for the stabbing and sexual assault of that little girl all those years ago was set free after sixteen years because finally, FINALLY, the courts accepted he hadn't done it, which of course he'd said all along.
How did they know this ? Well it was pretty rudimentary really. The little girls killer had left semen on her underwear. And the unfortunate chap thrown behind bars for this heinous crime by the mob baying for blood, who if I recall correctly wasn't exactly the brightest bulb in the electrical department, suffered from a medical condition that meant he weas sterile. So he was incapable of leaving any sperm anywhere. Poor bastard.
But of course the tale had a completely happy ending. Well, the lawyers who put him away no doubt continued to enjoy their elevated income and the lifestyle it brought, the lawyers who failed to defend him by asking the most obvious of questions "was this your sperm on these undergarments or not" no doubt continued to collect their pensions and I doubt the judge, jury or anyone else involved in the case was ever brought to book. Because that's one thing we don't do is it ? And as for the falsely accused ? Well he died two years later at the age of 44 so he wasn't going to be pressing his case for wrongful arrest and miscarriage of justice was he.
And so to this morning. Where trumpeted across the papers is the story that Blair's Wonderful DNA Gathering Big Brother State pulled some bloke over for a motoring offence, grabbed his DNA as a rsult, and then some 'cold case' squad working in a basement dungeon got lucky by crossmatching him to the underwear he left stained on the corpse all those years ago.
So why am I not cheering loudly in the streets hailing Blair as the guardian of all the good honest hard working decent people ? Because the good honest decent hard working father in me says I bloody well should be. But somehow I can't.
Soemthing within me says it's a pyrrhic victory.
Something tells me the 'Lets Do The ID Cards' lobby are celebrating this morning.
Something within me says a government led for ten years by a control freak, who handed the reins onto an even bigger control freak, just WONT be able to resist the temptation to use the fact that scientists will, within months, be growing DNA sequences to order in a test tube to "do An OJ bloody glove" job and plant artifically grown DNA on the underwear of someone murdered to order so that a Thorn in Gordon's Political Side can be silenced.
And somrthing within me says we ought to pause for a moment to remember the man cruelly wronged by the system all those years ago, who isn't around now to accept whatever grudging apology the people who put him away probably wouldn't bother offering anyway, who in my book is every bit as much the victim as the mother of that little girl who we saw yesterday walking into the court to finally see her daughter's killer put away.
And that's another thing. This bloke apparently assaulted another girl a year later, got hauled up for it, came out and when he had his collar felt recently was quoted as saying "I've Been Expecting This For Years". I suppose I ought to grab a photo of this bloke who is waking up behind bard this morning. Because I strongly suspect that in a few years he'll be transferred to Prescoed Open Prison, and will then be put up in a cosy little half way house just up the road from a couple of junior schools like all the other sex offenders in this neck of the woods.
What the hell are the people who "manage" our Fire Service thinking ?
