Paul Johnston

Rain on Sunday. Much needed after the driest January I can remember since 1976. There's talk of water shortage in the South East this year, which makes you one wonder at the determination of J. Prescott and K. Livingstone to cover the entire place with more and more houses which will all consume more and more water.

Mass at St. Catherine of Siena. Roped in to read OT, psalm and epistle. Readings (6th Sunday of the Year, Sunday cycle B) This would have been Septuagesima Sunday in the good old days.

Large article in Sunday Telegraph by Sion Jenkins, acquitted last week of murdering his foster daughter. He's been tried 3 times and convicted once, a conviction which, years later, was held to be unsafe. Even a second retrial jury couldn't come to an agreed verdict either way. The same happened at the first retrial. I have no insight that the poor jurors had not but aspects of the affair as presented do remind me strongly of 'The Aircraftman and the Carpenter' by Ludovic Kennedy. This is a study of the 1930s American case of the kidnapping and murder of the baby son of air-ace Charles Lindbergh. There the police were so sure they had got the right man, a German immigrant, that they seem to have refused to consider the possibility that he was innocent and, literally, 'fitted him up' for the crime. The jurors believed the police and the German carpenter was found guilty and executed. The same paper contains a long account by a woman who, with her partner, was wrongly accused of murdering a policeman in Florida in 1976. She spent 5 years on death row before her sentence was commuted to life. The conviction of both was later quashed altogether, but not before her partner had been executed 14 years after the crime and after the actual perpetrator had apparently confessed his own guilt and asserted their innocence. Given the degree of doubt about the fallibility of the 'system' and the people that operate it I conclude that we are probably better off without the death penalty here in Britain..