Those remarks coming from a supposedly impartial CPS senior lawyer, if correctly reported, beggar belief. She goes on to say, according to the Standard, that society should challenge myths including commonly held beliefs that rape was carried out by strangers in dark alleys and that women who were drunk were asking to be attacked. In fact, she says, the majority of rapes were committed by people known to the victims, many took place in the home and date or acquaintance rape was common. One of the biggest challenges for the prosecution, she adds, is to challenge jury assumptions that they bring to trial. This is particularly true in cases where the victim and defendant are known to each other or where the victim has consumed alcohol.

As juries do not give reasons for their verdicts, it can but be imagined from where Ms Saunders obtained her information. Or is this just another attempt to destabilise our cherished jury system?

Ms Saunders also makes the classic Crown Prosecution Service error of believing that all men she chooses to charge with rape are guilty and the trial is just a formality. She suggests that a judge’s directions to a jury on issues such as the need to avoid making false assumptions should be made earlier in the trial. Really! The last I heard, there was still a presumption of innocence in this country, although it has to be conceded that it appears to be fading fast.

Ms Saunders’ comments are offensive to those citizens who have their daily lives disrupted, often for weeks or months at a time, without proper compensation to sit on juries and impartially determine if the prosecution has proved its case. If they are not so satisfied, it is their duty to acquit the defendant.

Parliament makes the laws of this country. Ms Saunders’ duty is to gather the evidence and place it before a jury of the defendant’s peers who, I suggest, are well capable of understanding what goes on in the world without her guidance. The jury will set the standards according to its combined knowledge of people and the society in which it lives and will, to the best of its ability, deliver a true verdict according to the evidence. It will not be affected, as Ms Saunders appears to be, by meaningless CPS targets which expect X number of defendants charged with rape in a given period to be convicted without reference to the facts or circumstances. Methinks Ms Saunders has been a CPS “politician” for too long.

It is also suggested that criminals who are fined will face an increase in the current £15 “victim surcharge” to between £20 and £120. Even those imprisoned may be expected to pay between £60 and £120.

These dotty proposals are supposed to bridge the gap as the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, announces plans to curb compensation payments for the victims of crime.

Regular court users will know that there is no separate “victim surcharge” pot of money and it all goes straight to the exchequer. They are also aware that any attempt to levy so called victim surcharges on yobs or other criminals sent to prison is meaningless political hyperbole, for most of them don’t have two pennies to rub together or the costs of attempting to collect it are totally prohibitive.

The reality is that the vast majority of victim surcharges – which are just another form of taxation – will be paid by speeding motorists whose crimes are, in any event, completely victimless.

Interestingly perhaps, no United Kingdom authority has felt it appropriate to bring charges against him, but the case has been pursued by the US Customs & Border Agency at a time of increasingly hard line responses to online copyright infringement in America and Europe. Last year the Hollywood Movie Studies successfully secured a court order forcing BT to block access to Newzbin2, a members-only website that allegedly uses links to copyrighted material. In America SOPA (Stop Online Policy Act) legislation has been widely criticised by a number of technology firms. SOPA aims to stifle online copyright pirates by stopping web advertising networks and payment processors from doing business with them. Google, Twitter, Ebay and Wikipedia have criticised SOPA as a new form of censorship.

More importantly perhaps this ostensibly decent young man faces extradition to a foreign jurisdiction and a period of pre-trial imprisonment as a foreign national with no ties to that country. The perils which a fresh-faced youngster faces during incarceration while he awaits a long-winded trial process are all too obvious. His lawyer has quite properly pointed out that Richard would be the first British citizen to be extradited for such an offence and is being used as a guinea pig for copyright law in the United States.

If the courts feel bound to enforce this appalling piece of legislation introduced by the last Labour government, then it is time the coalition government showed some backbone and repealed it forthwith. Of course it is right that criminals facing serious offences like murder and kidnapping should be extradited in appropriate circumstances, but Richard O’Dwyer is not one of those people. It is a pity perhaps that prosecutors in this country did not show similar aggression to that exhibited by American prosecutors in this case when we wanted terrorists to be extradited from the US.

The first duty of any government is to protect its own citizens. Ironically, perhaps, the United States is the leader in this respect. The last Labour government failed its citizens lamentably. The coalition government has an opportunity to put that right and it should do so now. Every Member of Parliament should now stand up and be counted. Don’t let Richard O’Dwyer be another victim in order to appease American politicians and prosecutors.

Regrettably, teachers may face a regulatory farce. Education, like health and social care, is a major political football, and one fears that the temptation of ministers to intermeddle whenever there is a perceived political hot potato will be too much to resist.

Already the range of sanctions which the General Teaching council is able to impose (which include reprimand, a conditional registration order, suspension or removal) have been replaced with the single sanction of removal.

The TES reports that none of the 323 cases referred to the General teaching Council since August will be heard before its demise in March and none of the cases referred because of teaching ability will face any further action. Indeed, most of the cases referred since August are unlikely to meet the new higher criteria for investigation by the Teaching Agency and will not progress further. Furthermore, of the 292 outstanding cases referred to the General Teaching Council before August last year, only 30 have been scheduled for hearings and just 35 are being passed on to the Teaching Agency.

How does this square with the comments of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, who stresses the importance of good teachers to the success of pupils and his desire to rid schools of incompetent teachers?

It is important that a regulator has a range of appropriate sanctions at its disposal for misconduct or impaired fitness to practise. Sanctions must be fair and they must be proportionate.

In future head teachers, who have the stress and accompanying difficulties caused by making referrals, will need to exercise judgment at the outset as to whether the conduct would justify removal by a panel. Undoubtedly, many will avoid the process and find another way. Conversely, when a fitness to practise panel has determined that the facts against an errant teacher have been proved, it will have the choice of barring the teacher or taking no action. How many teachers now face the prospect of being removed because a panel will fear it should be seen to be taking some rather than no action when, in fact, in the past a proportionate sanction may have been suspension or even less?

This is fertile ground for legal argument before the Administrative Court whose judges can expect to be kept very busy over the next two or three years. In the meantime, the teachers’ nightmare continues!

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“A mind once stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Upholding the decision of Saunders J, the Lord Chief Justice said that even stretching language to its limits, the court was unable to envisage how dishonest claims by members of Parliament for their expenses or allowances began to involve the legislative or core functions of the relevant House, or the proper performance of their important public duties. No question or privilege arose, and the ordinary process of the criminal justice system should take its normal course unaffected by any groundless anxiety that they might constitute an infringement of the principles of parliamentary privilege.

Each of the defendants is due to stand trial at the Crown Court at Southwark to face allegations of false accounting contrary to section 17(1)(b) of the Theft Act 1968 in relation to their claims for expenses as members of Parliament. An essential ingredient common to all of them is that the defendant in question acted dishonestly. Three of the defendants were members of the House of Commons and one was, and is, a member of the House of Lords.

The court considered the authorities of Prebble v Television New Zealand Limited [1995] 1 AC 321, quoted with approval in Buchanan v Jenkins [2005] 1 AC 115 at 124, Burdett v Abbott (1811) 14 East 1, Stockdale v Hansard [1839] 9Ad and EI 1 at 134 and Bradlaugh v Gossett [1884] 12 QBD 271. Properly analysed, those decisions addressed problems which were essential to the performance of Parliament’s functions. They did not begin to come anywhere near judicial recognition that members of Parliament were immune from proceedings for criminal behaviour in Parliament.

The President of the Council of the Bars and Law Societies of Europe, Jose-Maria Davo-Fernandez forecasts that if a City firm with other European offices accepts external capital, as will be the case here when the scheme is effected, the issue will be taken up in Luxembourg at the European Court of Justice. Article 11 of the Establishment Directive permits Member States to bar from their jurisdictions any law firm that is not completely run by lawyers if it is deemed contrary to public policy to permit them to operate.

Lawyers who are employed in organisations where they are managed by non-lawyers will be well aware of the pressures to which they are subjected when their managers wish to pursue a course when the lawyer advises it has no proper legal basis. Injection of outside capital may well put lawyers under intolerable commercial pressure not to observe the rule of law.

The German bar authorities have already warned of the illegality of ABS in their country, and the American Bar Association is known to be decidedly cool towards the idea.

That led, under the last government, to the creation of the Office of the Health Professions Adjudicator (OHPA) although it is not yet fully operational. Whilst it was expected to take over the role of adjudicating on fitness to practise cases from the GMC from April 2011, the coalition government has expressed a desire to get rid of it but has indicated it will consult on its future.

Anne Milton, The Ministerial Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department of Health announced the government’s intention in a written statement. Having reviewed the case for OHPA the government is not persuaded that the creation of another body is necessarily the most appropriate and proportionate way forward in terms of adjudication. The government believes that steps can be taken to strengthen and modernise existing systems within the GMC to deliver substantially the same benefits as OHPA. The learning from these steps could then be reviewed and in due course applied to other health regulators.

In a recent interview Dame Janet Smith told BBC One’s Inside Out North West that not enough changes had been made since her inquiry. But those in the health sector will applaud the decision not to waste more public money, time and upheaval on the creation of what will be, in effect, just another QUANGO. The GMC has learned many lessons in the years that have passed since Shipman. It is now the premier healthcare regulator, a fact recognised by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, which commented in its recent Review of Health Professional Regulatory Bodies: The public can be reassured that the GMC has achieved … high standards despite the particular challenges arising from the nature and work of the profession which it regulates.

Former Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has defended the ASBO and is quoted as saying that they had made a huge contribution to cutting crime and removing them would be a blow to communities blighted by yobs. But criminal practitioners know differently. So often the ASBO “badge” is worn with pride by the young offender who gains credibility among his peers, and when he reoffends – as he usually does – the courts are very slow to mete out the severe punishment he was promised at the time of its imposition.

But the ASBO is a civil remedy, and the main criticism is reserved for its ability to criminalise individuals merely because they had breached the order which had been imposed because the perceived offender was merely a nuisance in his community. It is the sort of order one has come to expect from a totalitarian regime, not one which professes to prize justice.

The type of social problem the ASBO was meant to cure is much better dealt with by education, discipline and example. Let the criminal law deal with punishment, retribution and rehabilitation where appropriate.