This is sick, but perversely reassuring. With the great miscarriages of justice of the 70s, the first phase was that the judge, the cops, the Home Office, and all right-thinking people agreed, and nobody took seriously that the victims might be innocent. This lasted a long, long time; but then we passed into the second phase, when the cops and the government spin doctors concentrated on bullying those of the victims who had been released, and those people who dared to say they were innocent. It was an important stage in the evolution of resistance; dissent was suddenly worth punishing.
Not that this helped very much, and it won’t help Jim Bates much. But the sheer stupid desperation here is telling. They arrested him for possessing the hard disk they’d given him to examine; brilliant, PC Brains. We’ve discussed Bates before; it’s worth pointing out that absolutely none of the facts of the cases he was involved in depend on his credentials. Nullius in verba, right? They didn’t here; they didn’t here.
But if Bates is guilty of possession, then the obvious conclusion is that…so are the police! Perhaps they should arrest themselves?