Chris Huhne changes plea to guilty

[NicholasTeakozy]

BBC link here. I reckon that's the end of his political career then.

Jury clearly a bunch of bozos.

The question about religious conviction really takes the biscuit.

And the one about deciding based on evidence not presented in court.

The judge and both counsel are "a bunch of bozos", if they misdirected the jury to the standard of proof required in the marital coercion defence.

This was an extremely simple case, evidentially and legally, and it would be beyond stupefying if all 3 of them have let the jury be misdirected to the central issue in law.

Tiggy, the fact that Price lied by signing a form stating she was driving, thereby perverting the course of justice, has been proven. The burden of proof for asserting her defence of marital coercion surely lies with her and not the prosecution.

Beryl - that's what I think, too. Logically, at any rate, you'd expect the burden of proof to be on the defence to show that she was coerced. Legally, it might be different - it might be the case that the prosecution has to prove she wasn't coerced, because that is the way it works normally, ie it's up to the prosecution to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt. But then you have this conundrum: how do you prove someone wasn't coerced? It's a very very hard thing to prove, almost impossible, I'd have thought. No wonder the jury felt very confused by it all and started to wonder about whether they could take into account stuff that wasn't presented in court.

However, if cumfy is right, it shouldn't have been about reasonable doubt at all, it should have been balance of probabilities.

tiggy the onus is on the defence to prove coercion, not the prosecution to prove she wasn't coerced. Marital coercion is a defence in law, the presumption is that she acted of her own volition. As I understand it she only has to prove coercion on the balance of probablities though, not beyond reasonable doubt.

The prosecution still need to prove the offence beyond a reasonable doubt, but Pryce's admission pretty much does that for them.

Sorry for the redundancy. Selectively reading posts while being jumped on by children...

tiggy, everything you say is reasonable, and as the judge laid it out. And yet I've just read this by a barrister:

www.charterchambers.com/news/2013/02/20/til-points-do-us-part-the-defence-of-marital-coercion/

He says:

"A defendant relying on this defence therefore has to prove two things, on the balance of probabilities:

That the crime was committed in the presence of her husband
That the crime was committed under the coercion of her husband"

Now, to me, that clearly says that the burden of proof lies with the defence, not the prosecution. Yet rather annoyingly, the barrister doesn't then go on to say "but the judge got it wrong!" I'm actually quite tempted to write to him and ask him.

At the risk of quoting wikipedia:

The burden of proof is on the defence to prove marital coercion on the balance of probabilities. For duress, the burden is on the prosecution to disprove duress beyond reasonable doubt.

This would appear to be at odds with the directions of the judge that Tiggy refers to.

But Tiggy, your argument surely makes a presumption that coercion exists in any situation where a wife is married to her husband and her husband is present?

S47 states:

'Any presumption of law that an offence committed by a wife in the presence of her husband is committed under the coercion of the husband is hereby abolished, but on a charge against a wife for any offence other than treason or murder it shall be a good defence to prove that the offence was committed in the presence of, and under the coercion of, the husband'.

I still think that it is for the defence to prove the coercion, not just that she is legally married to him and that he was present. However, I will admit that I am neither a judge or a barrister ?

If the judge has misdirected the jury, you would have thought that legal bods would have picked up on this.

Tiggy, is there an analogy with murder/'manslaughter? So say I admit to killing Fred Bloggs but my defence is that I was of unsound mind at the time, then unless the prosecution can refute that defence, I cannot be found guilty of murder (though in that case might be found guilty of a lesser charge eg manslaughter)?

No tiggy. It use to be the case that a woman was presumed to have been coerced, and the prosecution had to prove that she wasn't. But the law changed, now if a wife wants to claim marital coercion she has to prove she was legally married and that he was present at the time and that she was coerced to a standard of the balance of probabilities.

That's the bit fo the statute that says "it shall be a good defence to prove that the offence was committed in the presence of, and under the coercion of, the husband". Defences in law are up to the defence to prove, the presumption is that it didn't happen unless it can be proved. The prosecution ought to be presenting evidence that contradicts her assertion of coercion if they have any though.

We certainly need to encourage juries to ask questions and not to be put off and mocked for doing so. Some of their questions did not seem too unusual. They are just a bunch normal women (most of them are female) and if they are asking some questions which show some of them do not have the first idea they might have put that one forward (the rest of them who realised the question was an iidiot one) it might have been because they could not get that one juror to shut up about the issue or accept the views of the others so they had to put it to the judge to get it settled.

I wonder if she did agree to obey her husband in the marriage vows.

It's on the balance of probabilities then - have the defence presented evidence that shows it is more likely than not to have occurred?

YY Xenia. I have served on a jury and we were encouraged by the clerk to send any questions to the judge - which did include a query about why a specific person mentioned by both prosecution and defence was not present in court. I think a lot of questions sound like " stupid" questions when reported but no-one wanted to make a mistake on something fundamental - I think that made us cautious, not idiots. And our case was more straightforward than this one, where there is on this thread and therefore presunably in the wider workd, a lack of clarity about burden of proof.

I agree with Xenia.

To my mind the jury questions are entirely reasonable, and the judge has screwed up completely and misdirected the jury in several matters.

For instance, re the marriage vows; the fact that CH and VP took vows is a common knowledge fact that the jury are entirely entitled to consider, and counsel and the judge have rather short-sightedly overlooked.

The judge should have directed that her marriage vows, whilst being a relevant consideration, absolutely do not extend to obeying instructions to break the law; not the utter fuckwittery he came out with saying it was irrelevant as she hadn't raised it in evidence.

Xpost Doctrine