THECOCONUTWHISPERER

 

‘We want to know how YOU feel’: Why a woke British judge failed to deport a serial sex offender back to South Africa

Frank Furedi

is an author and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

By failing to deport a persistent flasher because he didn’t get the chance to express his feelings about his crimes, British courts are heading down a dangerous route, prioritising emotionalism over the principle of justice.

It looks like the British criminal justice system is fast coming to resemble a reality TV series. A serial convicted sex offender from South Africa has just won an appeal against his deportation after a judge ruled that the Home Office did not offer him a “fair opportunity” to disclose to the court how he felt about his crimes.

It appears that very soon it will be mandatory for a British court to provide criminals with an opportunity to reveal their feelings about their offences before they can be sentenced. At least, that is the outlook which informed the decision of the very woke judge who halted the deportation of Phile Negma.

Negma, who has been convicted of four indecent exposures and been the subject of a sex offender’s notice for 15 years, is the beneficiary of what’s best described as the ‘emotional turn’ of the system of criminal justice.

Just like reality TV, which promotes emotionalism, British courts have embraced the culture of feelings. The high point of any show like ‘The X-Factor’ occurs towards the end, when a contestant is asked ‘how do you feel?’. Telling the world of your feelings serves as a form of public catharsis. It also indicates that how you feel sometimes trumps what you did. While this performance is acceptable for ‘The X-Factor’, it is not suitable for a criminal court.

It is a sign of the times that a member of the British judiciary takes the view that justice cannot be served unless Negma is provided with an opportunity to explain how he feels about his crime. Once upon a time, the criminal justice system operated on the basis of evaluating the gravity of a criminal act and was rightly indifferent to the feelings of the offender.

But not the judge who stopped Negma’s deportation. The judge claimed that he was surprised that “there was no engagement” on the part of the Home Office with “the appellant” as to how the denial to talk about how he felt about his crime impacted “upon his ability to address sexual preoccupation and deviant fantasies linked to voyeurism.”

What a very strange comment indeed. Whether or not Negma has an opportunity to address his sexual perversion has little to do with the decision of the Home Office to deport him. How Negma feels about exposing his genitals while looking straight in the eyes of a female passer-by may be of interest to a psychiatrist, but should not be the basis for a legal judgement.

The incorporation of emotionalism into the system of justice is actively promoted by mental health activists and legal crusaders promoting therapeutic jurisprudence. In a world where how you feel frequently trumps what you did, it is not surprising that the courts often behave as if the people standing before them are not offenders or victims, but potential victims in a psychiatric ward.

For a very long time, offenders have had their sentences reduced or were entirely let off on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to a mental health problem. In recent times, an obsession with mental health and emotions has become even more internalised by the courts. Lawyers frequently seek to relieve their clients of responsibility for the offences they committed on the ground that they too are victims – in this case a victim of emotional upheaval.

Advocates of therapeutic jurisprudence insist that feelings and emotions need to be at the centre of legal proceedings. They claim that how courts operate and the decisions that they make have to be evaluated from the standpoint of their impact on people’s emotional and psychological wellbeing. In America, where the adoption of this approach is most advanced, the language used in court proceedings often resembles that which prevails in a mental health institution.

The main problem with the emotional turn of the legal system is not that it results on being too soft on criminals. I have no wish to see the imposition of a harsh system of criminal justice on society. The real problems with the influence of psychology on court proceedings is that it violates the principle of fair and equal justice. We all know that it is not fair when the rich achieve better legal outcomes than the poor. It is no less fair when those who know how to play the emotional card are held to a different standard than those who don’t.

Let’s judge people in accordance with their actions, and leave their feelings to the likes of Simon Cowell and his friends.