The end of the Jenkins affair?
One of the biggest news stories of the past week was the acquittal of Siôn Jenkins ([1], [2]) during his third trial for the murder of his foster-daughter, Billie-Jo Jenkins (from an unrelated Jenkins family), in 1997. Siôn (pronounced Shaun) Jenkins claimed he found Billie-Jo dying in his back garden, having been battered with a metal tent peg, and tiny spots of blood found on his clothing led to his conviction. Within a week of his conviction, Bob Woffinden (a noted campaigner on miscarriages of justice) had an article published in the New Statesman, declaring on the front page “Sion Jenkins is innocent”. He remained in jail, however, until 2004. (More: [Progressive Gold](http://progressivegoldbeta.blogspot.com/2006/02/interesting-co-incidence-billie-jos.html),
Technorati Tags: sion+jenkins
Jenkins’ trials came to an end after a jury declared on Thursday that it could not reach a verdict. Customarily, after two deadlocked trials, a not-guilty verdict is registered. As we live in the Blair era, in which the Magna Carta has been ripped up and “double jeopardy” is no longer prevented, he may be retried if new evidence emerges. But this is the custom when two successive juries cannot reach a verdict.
The response to the verdict had obviously been well-prepared in advance; it consisted of a volley of slurs on Jenkins’ character. Jenkins was apparently a wife-beater and an adulterer; his new marriage, to a woman several years older than him who met him after his conviction, denounced by his in-laws who call him a “gold-digger” and refuse to speak either to him or his wife. The fact that he was a wife-beater (remember, “wife-beater” in this day and age means any man who ever laid a hand in anger on his wife, not necessarily someone who beats his wife habitually and/or gratuitously) was not disclosed to the jury, which has led to fresh calls for juries to be told such facts about people’s characters.
A number of both Jenkins families have obviously sold their stories to various tabloid newspapers. Siôn apparently received an offer from the Scum, which included a condition that he take their lie detector test. He refused, with the result that the Scum denounced him on their front page as a coward. In fact, lie detectors are well-known to be unreliable and are never used in the justice system; in the US, contrary to some people’s misconceptions, the same is true in most places. Even on Thursday evening, the attacks on Siôn Jenkins by various members of Billie-Jo’s family were gleefully reported. Her aunt, Maggie Coster, delievered this oration from the public gallery:
It’s not over yet, Jenkins, you fucking child killer, everyone knows it. She was a 13-year-old kid, you fucking bible bashing prat, it ain’t over.
As the reader might gather from this, Billie-Jo’s family were, and in some cases still are, criminals. One of them has recently been jailed for rape. Her parents met when one of them was in jail, and her father was later imprisoned, her mother putting her into care when she became unable to cope. None of this makes the murder of Billie-Jo less of a crime, but the question needs to be asked why their outbursts and “stories” are given such credence by the tabloids; they are chavs (riff-raff), and assuming Siôn Jenkins is indeed innocent, as the evidence for his guilt has failed to convince two juries who saw much more of the evidence than we have, they certainly could not have given her a better life than her foster family did.
The worst aspect of this chapter of the Jenkins saga is that it includes all the characteristics of a case which leads to hysterical calls for the overturning of centuries-old, and mostly good, law. The biggest of those is the restrictions on what juries can hear, which exist for the very good reason that such facts are prejudicial. They allow a jury to be told that a defendant is evil, when this does not prove that someone did the crime at hand; it merely gives the jury an ill-feeling about the defendant. The phenomenon of juries [convicting partly because of prejudice](http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200203/ai_n9045002) (particularly racial prejudice) is well-known; how can it serve the interests of justice to introduce more prejudice? It may, of course, make them wary of their suspicions and thus less likely to convict, but whether it has this effect or not is not something that can be predicted. It’s a matter of chance.
So, the remaining case seems to rest on the fact that the other prime suspect, a person with a known psychiatric history whose fetishes match aspects of the murder, is supposedly ruled out by an alibi, that there is supposedly nobody else who could have done it, and the fact that Jenkins is a serial liar and an all-round shit. We shouldn’t forget that smear campaigns commonly follow the endings of court cases, and as Bob Woffinden’s article linked above points out, this is nowhere more true than of bad cases: the hatchet job on Sally Clark, later cleared, after her imprisonment is a well-known example. The reason the law was framed the way it was is that the occasional acquittal of a guilty man is preferable to the punishment of an innocent one, even if he is demonstrably of otherwise ill character. It’s not a bug in the system; it’s a feature, and it’s there for a reason.
