Grounds for Mercy

The Office for Judicial Complaints has been looking into a comment made by the former Downing Street madonna, Cherie Booth, when she was sitting as a judge. Booth appeared to deviate from the Thatcher/Howard/Straw doctrine of lock-'em-up-or-kick-'em-out which has set the judicial standard for the past quarter century or so when she gave a man a suspended sentence for breaking somebody's jaw. She told the offender that he would be spared prison "based on the fact you are a religious person" - not based on mitigating circumstances or because his family would suffer hardship if he went to jail or because there was a smaller chance of his reoffending if he stayed out, but because he was a god-botherer. The Office for Judicial Complaints has decided that no disciplinary action is necessary, and the lord chancellor and lord chief justice agree. Booth, of course, is herself a very wealthy god-botherer with some not inconsiderable criminal connections of her own; but to imply that this had anything to do with the conclusions of the Office for Judicial Complaints would be to impugn British justice, and we all know what a magnificent thing British justice is these days.