Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered by police now more than three years ago is once again denied justice, as the coroner in the inquest to his death ruled out a verdict of unlawful killing:
The family of Jean Charles de Menezes walked out of his inquest yesterday as the coroner ruled the jury was forbidden from considering whether he was unlawfully killed.
Sir Michael Wright said he did not believe the testimony justified him allowing them to return a verdict which was tantamount to accusing police officers of murder or manslaughter.
As the De Menezes family and their supporters walked out the coroner said he knew the jury’s hearts would go out to the dead man’s mother, Maria Otone de Menezes. “But these are emotional reactions, ladies and gentlemen, and you are charged with returning a verdict based on evidence,” he said.
And so the establishment once again take care of its own. Can’t embarass the police, especially after they have been so obliging to the government recently. No wonder Craig Murray is furious, especially about this shitty bit of reasoning from “sir” Michael wright:
But he urged caution on judging anything they viewed as lying too harshly. “You must decide whether the person has lied or made an honest mistake. If you can prove that the witness has lied you should bear … in mind people tell lies for a variety of reasons, not necessarily to put their own part.
“Do please excuse the police for not just murdering Jean, but lying about it and covering up their murder almost from the moment his body hit the floor”. Disgusting, but it fits in with how this case has been treated from the start. This has never been about getting justice for Jean, but about exculpating the police for his murder. It’s an old, old pattern in British policing, which has a shameful record of wrongful killings and people dying in its custody and getting away with it. It’s the other side of the same coin that saw antiterrorist police arrest Damien Green MP. Three years ago the government allowed the police their ritual murder to relieve their frustration, last week we saw the police returning the favour through a nicely staged bit of political intimidation.
Both cases sent a message to the British public. In the de Menezes case it’s “we can and will murder you with impunity if we feel like”, in Green’s case it’s “it doesn’t matter how powerful you are, step out of line and we’ll squash you”. With Green, he himself may “only” suffer a humiliating and frightening arrest and questioning, but to everbody with less clout than him this message comes through loud and clear.
Together these two cases are the clearest indication of police state Britain, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. As Jamie said, talking about the Green case:
People have a crude idea that a police state involves a leader ordering the cops to arrest his enemies. It’s mainly an environment where the police have expanded powers over the general administration of the state which they can exercise with a large degree of autonomy. Their turf gets bigger, and is defended and expanded more aggressively.
Which is exactly what has happened under New Labour. From the very beginning they’ve used the police and the justice system as a political tool, unleashing a torrent of ill-thought out, unworkable policies to curry favour with the tabloids, an equally large torrent of dodgy statistics and press releases to show the succes of these policies, all topped with the occasional potemkin showpiece of serious policing. After September 11 these tendencies only worsened. Remember the tanks at Heathrow the day before Parliament had to vote on the War on Iraq? Long before the British establishment finally noticed last week therefore the police had been politicised and the murder of Jean charles de Menezes as well as the arrest of Damien Green are a logical outcome of this. New Labour flacks may not even been lying when they insist Green’s arrest was the police’s own idea, but the responsibility is still theirs.
