The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 30/11/21
Freedom For One, Freedom For All
Earlier this year, the ex-diplomat, human rights campaigner, author and journalist Craig Murray was convicted in a Scottish court of the offence of contempt of court via 'jigsaw identification' (a bizarre concept, whereby someone can be convicted on the basis of just one piece of evidence leading to the possible identification of a protected complainant in a sexual assault case; how a 'jigsaw' can have only one piece is an exercise best left to the imagination - possibly that of Maurits Escher).
In an astonishing and deeply troubling judgement by Leeona Dorrian, the second most senior member of the Scottish judiciary, Murray was sentenced to eight months imprisonment, the first journalist to be jailed for contempt of court in Scotland in seventy years (other cases have been settled by fines). After the very judge who heard his case refused to allow an appeal against the sentence, and after the Supreme Court of the State calling itself 'The United Kingdom' refused to hear the case at all, Craig Murray reported for imprisonment at the beginning of August this year.
(A précis of the issues can be found here)
Further indignities included the fact that - unlike those convicted of a criminal offence rather than a civil one - he was denied the option of being released early on a monitoring tag, and so he had to spend four months locked up before being eligible for release.
That there was clearly political interference with the prosecution and the sentencing as well is (as the legaloids say) 'beyond reasonable doubt', and could be seen as an act of revenge for the fact that Craig Murray - in sharp contrast to the state and corporate media - reported on the defence case in the trial of former First Minister Alex Salmond, and hence made manifest the clear attempt by the Scottish Government - through a politically-compromised prosecutorial system - to fit Salmond up for crimes which the jury (mostly female) assessed had never occurred.
Craig Murray was finally released this morning after four months spent in the COVID-infested Saughton Prison in Edinburgh. Given that the very same state and corporate media who managed to get away with conduct which was far more likely to lead to 'jigsaw identification' of Salmond's false accusers have failed totally to report this either, click on the photo to see and hear his statement upon his release:
It being the date it is, I celebrated with a haggis tea (just like this one last St Andrew's Day, in fact).
