"Highly Reliable" Evidence and British Justice

It should have never gone to the Westminster Magistrates Court. The wrong two people went to court for the duration of the last 7 days. If it had to be anyone, it should have been the poor soul at Crown Prosecution Services who, after poring over a grainy, low-quality excerpt from TV footage, came to the decision that this tirade of foul-mouthed logger-headed abuses had to be pulled into a legal court. Sigh.

It was an ignominious travesty. A sordid encounter of a few hundred pages, up to the brim of disdraceful language and identical accounts from 20-odd players. It was a disgrace and frankly, a sticky wicket for both Anton Ferdinand and John Terry as well as English football – pray, football on the whole. But none more than CPS, actually; nasty own goal by the goalkeeper for CPS.

Unlike the Suarez-Evra issue, where the FA had a perfectly smooth prosecution and dished out worthy punishment to the party charged, CPS decided to wash the issue off the FA’s hands, taking it into their own, by citing that they had ‘reliable evidence’ worthy of a high-profile case in a public court. Wow! Definitely, they’d have had some unseen footage from a TV camera which was not telecasted. Maybe a close-up video of the whole incident! Or an audio file revealing the exact exchanges! Anything other than those YouTube videos we’d all seen and heard, right?

But no, they produced the same video from the same video-sharing website. The same video which had receive an umpteen number of views on YouTube. The video which gave them NEWT video information – Nothing Extraodinary With This. The video, of low quality, caught on a camera which was more than a few metres away was never going to be especially defining in this case. It simply was not conclusive.

One of the few things Terry used in his defence was that he was simply ‘repeating’ what Ferdinand had allegedly said and that the remark was ‘sarcastic’. Sources close the ex-England captain originally claimed that he called Ferdinand a ‘blind c***’, not black. In court however, Terry argued the words ‘f****** black c***’ were used in sarcasm or a spirit of irony, but used nonetheless. The true irony, the true joke, in this case of course, is that the word that was deemed abusive enough to warrant a high-profile legal hearing was not required to be censored. As the Tweeters and Facebookers would say, “LOL”.

Asterisks were the single most dominant punctuation in the report, as anyone who had even glanced through them, like me, would’ve noticed. But the onus of the case in its entirety actually rested on one single punctuation mark. The debate for most of the the week’s court sessions had been about whether Terry said, ‘F*** off, f*** off . . . f****** black c*** . . . f****** k*******’ as Ferdinand had claimed or if he said, ‘F*** off, f*** off . . . f****** black c***? F****** k*******’. Similar to ‘Let’s eat, Grandma!’ and ‘Let’s eat Grandma!’, this controversy has just been broken down to another example of how punctuation can make or break lives. Without that small little squiggle and a dot, Terry is found guilty, tarnishes what’s left of his image and is irreversibly branded a racist. With it, his defence lawyers could voice his reputation was intact. As far as alibis are concerned, it does not seem substantial. But, finally and decisively, they could not prove he said otherwise and the court was back to square one.

‘Weighing all the evidence together, I think it is highly unlikely that Mr Ferdinand accused Mr Terry on the pitch of calling him a black c***. However, I accept that it is possible that Mr Terry believed at the time, and believes now, that such an accusation was made. ‘It is a crucial fact that nobody has given evidence they heard what Mr Terry said or more importantly how he said it.’ said the Chief Magistrate who overlooked the happenings.

This was exactly where we were 9 to 10 odd months ago. Where the FA were. From where the FA could have gone on to produce some kind of valid judgement. The CPS inevitably and invariably failed the big question and ruined their reputation in the process by inviting trouble – inviting a case which the FA is quite capable of handling.

If Anton Ferdinand did not originally hear any racist remark being shouted at him, then Terry’s repetition claim goes out the window, unless he heard it from a ghost. And how did Terry’s ‘blind’ go to ‘black’ in his alibi? We’re still trudging in the damp, never ending darkness, CPS.

Official sporting organisations have their code of conduct by which players belonging to their federation are dished out the right punishment. The first priority to investigate the case must have been given to the FA. And surely, a magistrate court has better things to do than hear two ‘gentlemen’ dish out allegations at one another of, what was it? Oh, shagging a teammate’s missus and bad breath, with a tinge of a racial slur. The court proceedings, for those who read them, seemed hilarious and reminiscent of a circus, actually.

Anton Ferdinand’s own team branded him as too ‘unsophisticated’ to have started the tirade, while John Terry sent the courtroom into peals of laughter after saying ‘Please’ 4 times, when the cross-examiner asked him to repeat if he’s been sent off four times, please. Add to the mix, the personal duel between the pro-Arsenal prosecutor and Ashley Cole. Not to forget the amusing, dimwitted double-meaning Rio Ferdinand tweets and voila, you have the recipe for a courtroom drama/comedy serial to be telecasted on BBC1 at 5-30 Friday evening.

All we can do now, I guess, is sit back and sigh. Unless you’re Fabio Capello whereby you’d sit back, sigh, shake your head and mutter Italian.