On Julian Assange
Is nobody at all going to notice, in any context at all, that disputed-consent acquaintance rape cases have an very, very low conviction rate no matter what else, that nobody has ever found a way to alter this fact, and that therefore the odds are astonishingly high that everyone involved in this shit-show is wasting their time? I mean, everyone involved on both sides of the thing is bellowing about "due process" of this and that, but is there nobody at all involved who has even considered renting a room and getting some coffee for both sides' lawyers and having a get-it-done meeting aimed at actually advancing some slim possibility of ever reaching a conclusion? Or would everyone involved prefer to just carry on making speeches and appearing on television until kingdom come? I apparently meet only a particular and specialised subset of the legal profession.
Jacques Verges, in France, invented the concept of the "barrage". It's a specialised defence strategy for use when your client is not only amazingly obviously guilty, but also guilty of such horrendous (often literally genocidal) crimes that there is no hope of leniency or mitigation either. Basically it involves just fucking around and taking up as much of the court's time as possible to allow your client to make unrelated political speeches and/or throw around accusations of greater moral culpability at the side which won the war in which your client committed the atrocities he is currently on trial for.
I read about it in the 1980s. I thought it would remain a micro-curiosity, but no, here people are trying to convert it into the beginnings of a mass market product. Michael Mansfield QC and Claes Bergstrom. Two guys who deserve each other.
Update: Apparently Wikipedia says that the Verges strategy was called "rupture", not "barrage". Memory is unreliable so I won't gainsay them.
It is further noted that Verges is a hugely tiresome blowhard, so presumably it was pleasure as well as business. In fact, there seems to be a lot of tiresome blowhardry going on...
ReplyDeleteYou're framing it as a problem for the professionals. Isn't the key decisionmaker Assange himself? Compromise is difficult with a paranoid accused.
ReplyDeleteAt present, it's hard to tell exactly how paranoid Assange is because his reactions are overdetermined - when they're frightened of a politically motivated prosecution (for something they might also be feeling guilty about) and the foreign minister is saying "your fears are totally ridiculous and we'll storm a foreign embassy if necessary to prove it", then paranoid patients act more or less like you or I would in that situation.
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to see is someone making a good faith effort to solve the problem - then we can see how unreasonable Assange is. I keep reading all these blog posts going "It's outrageous! People who are accused don't usually get to dictate the terms of their questioning! It's unheard of to give any sort of assurances at all!" and all I can think is "look, do you want to do this thing or don't you?". Everyone's in a situation in which a sensible compromise could make things better and they're all doing the Ian Paisley bit going "NO DEALS!"
So yeah, I think it's a problem for the professionals. Unlike Assange, the professionals (including his legal team who are IMO frankly clowns) are the people whose job it is to know how to get things done. They're not acting like professionals.
Not to mention that the US is out to get him, and has acted outrageously in its attempts to get other people related to his cause. So his fears here are not exactly without cause.
ReplyDeleteGenerally, I'm all for negotiated outcomes, but I think there's a fair chance that there isn't a sensible compromise that both sides will accept. For compromise to be on the table, you'd have to assume both good faith on the part of the Swedish government (that is, that there isn't actually a plot to shanghai him into US custody for Wikileaks-related maltreatment), and good faith on Assange's part (that he's willing to subject himself to Swedish criminal process for the rape accusations, and is only resisting going to Sweden because he's afraid they'll turn him over to the US). If either side (or both sides) is acting in bad faith there -- my guess is Assange is, because I can't figure out why he's more afraid of being under Swedish control than he was of being under UK control, but I could easily be missing something -- there's no sensible compromise to be had, and all the coffee and conference rooms in the world won't get to one.
ReplyDeleteI think there's a fair chance that there isn't a sensible compromise that both sides will accept
ReplyDeleteYou might be right (personally, I don't trust Assange), but if there is a compromise to be found, not trying to find it isn't going to find it.
Sure, but on the one hand, this looks like a situation where it's going to be fairly transparent to the parties whether or not there is a possible compromise, and so if it doesn't look as if they're working on one, it's likely because they know it's pointless, and on the other hand you and I don't know what negotiations are going on.
ReplyDeleteThere's a PR strategy that either side could adopt of making a public offer that's transparently reasonable enough that not accepting makes the other party look unreasonable, but that's often hard to pull off. I think Assange's team tried to do that by asking for binding assurances that he wouldn't be extradited to the US, but of course that request was rejected as impossible by the Swedes, and without a fair amount of knowledge it's hard to tell whether the request or the refusal was the unreasonable position to take.