What is the best way to get away with murder? In the United States especially, it is to wear a badge. Police officers who shoot innocent citizens are seldom brought to book. In the UK, police shootings do happen, but they are extremely rare. Domestic murders on the other hand are sadly all too common. Men murder their wives and lovers; women murder their husbands and lovers. The big difference is that when a woman is the perpetrator rather than the victim, there will always be some mischief-maker waiting to cry foul, to turn the perpetrator into the victim and the victim into the perpetrator.
One such mischief-maker is the lawyer Harriet Wistrich; she's done this quite a few times over the years, and is hoping to do it again soon with two women: Farieissia Martin and Emma-Jayne Magson (pictured above with the tattooed chest). Like Sally Challen who put a hammer in her handbag then battered her estranged husband over the head twenty times, they are guilty as sin. Years after Challen's conviction, she told Wistrich's lover and collaborator Julie Bindel how Richard Challen had raped her on a number of occasions. Yet she still went back for more. At her trial in 2011,
the jury heard how she had accessed his e-mails, monitored his Facebook page, and his voicemail messages. She asked a neighbour to spy on him, yet curiously, all this was later interpreted as him stalking and harassing her.
The Martin case was discussed here in
a recent article. Magson is cut from the same cloth, a violent woman who took a knife to the man with whom she lived. So how does Miss Wistrich plan to spring Martin and Magson from prison?
Both these women were convicted of murder on overwhelming evidence, and normally new evidence will not be admitted on appeal. The same provision applies broadly in the United States and most countries that have fair criminal justice systems. However, under the
Criminal Appeal Act, 1995, fresh evidence can be admitted
subject to two broad criteria. It must be evidence that is "capable of belief" and evidence that was not available at the time, or if it was available at the time, there must be a reasonable explanation for its not being adduced at trial. No one is entitled to more than one trial.
Comment: Few - if any - Western nations have clean hands when it comes to the endless war of terror on the Middle East. And, as noted above, and as seen in the innumerable other abhorrent actions by soldiers of other nations, it gives free reign for sick individuals to channel their rage or satisfy their blood lust: