Magson
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.

The exclusion of fresh evidence is for a very good reason. Given enough time and resources, evidence can be adduced to "prove" a guilty party is actually innocent. Existing witnesses can be "got at", ie bribed; new witnesses can be conjured up out of thin air; exculpatory forensic evidence can be manufactured...

Harriet Wistrich is of course aware of this, and spoke candidly about it in a documentary on the Challen case. Her technique for getting around the fresh evidence exclusionary rule is to manufacture some mental aberration in her client, find some so-called expert witness to testify to its reality - like Barbara Ziv in the recent Harvey Weinstein case - then piggyback fresh evidence on the back of it, that fresh evidence being what a horrible person the victim was, and how he deserved it.

The reader can actually see this on Miss Wistrich's misnamed Justice For Women website. Here is what she or one of her team writes about the Magson case. (This page has been archived by the WayBack Machine in the event of any further gaslighting by its creators).

"23-year old Emma-Jayne Magson killed her partner James Knight in March 2016. She has never denied that she inflicted the fatal stab wound which caused his death."

That is a massive lie. After Magson's conviction, Leicestershire Police released the audio of her emergency call. She can be heard quite clearly telling the operator she has no idea what had happened. She stabbed him with a steak knife.

Leaving aside this grotesque lie, the Court Of Appeal is now being told that Magson was/is suffering from unstable personality disorder. Which means what? A mental disorder, so-called, is not a medical condition, it is simply a description of a person's behaviour. When Rurik Jutting was tried in Hong Kong for torturing two prostitutes to death, his legal team claimed he was "suffering from" sexual sadism disorder. In other words, he enjoyed torturing people to death. Does that mean he should be released, or treated as a patient rather than the psychopathic lowlife he is?

Regarding Magson, Harriet Wistrich is clearly hoping the Court Of Appeal will also take into account the evidence that was not adduced at her trial. There are good reasons for this. This "new" evidence was invented only since her trial, while other evidence that was not submitted is totally irrelevant.

For example: "Emma met James Knight not long after the end of her relationship with a previous abusive partner. She had in her childhood witnessed domestic abuse and her adolescent and adult relationships with men were characterised, in the main, by her deferential and accommodating role."

So here we have poor Emma. She goes from man to man, from abuser to abuser. The reality is that like Farieissia Martin, Emma-Jayne Magson gave as good as she got and then some. There is certainly no evidence that James Knight ever stabbed Magson, and there is no evidence that Kyle Farrell ever raped Farieissia Martin.

So which of these lovelies will be the first to get away with murder? That depends on which one gets to the Court Of Appeal first. And on just how gullible are the appellate judges. In 1998, Lord Justice Kennedy drove a bus through the appeal of Zoora Shah, who had poisoned her lover Mohammed Azam. Sadly he is now long retired. One can only hope that whoever does hear their cases will not be taken in as easily as the mainstream media, and the saps who have donated to the crowdfunding appeal set up by Magson's mother.