The Scott Guy Trial and Privacy: A Society on Trial

A society that puts the private affairs, and pain, of the Guy/Macdonald families on the six o’clock news every night for our prurient interest is a barbaric one. The mother’s evidence and grief two days ago recounting the death of her son should not have been public spectacle, nor should Anna Macdonald’s hellish position of giving evidence regarding her (weeping) husband, in the case of her brother’s murder, both men of whom she loved. None of this is any of our business. It’s justice meets reality TV with its sick lineage back to the gladiator pits of Rome. It’s the barbaric life and justice of the tribe lived in public. For the opening news item tonight, why doesn’t TVNZ just put Jerry Springer on in the place of Simon Dellow: that’ll be good for ratings.

A major theme that readers will soon pick up in this blog is that civilisation is a movement toward privacy, the police state the reverse: that if you have no privacy, then you have no liberty. And how we treat privacy in this instance, with cameras rolling in the courts, makes a mockery of innocent until proven guilty: if Ewen Macdonald is innocent, it’s too late already to save his reputation and future prospects, because there was always this second trial by the public who are not in court and don’t get all the facts. We’ve already heard from Lindy Chamberlain this week, what such bush justice is like. In respect of privacy issues I find the political Left and Right both equally repugnant.

To carry out their program of theft, sorry, redistribution, the Left from the get-go had to destroy the privacy of every individual: for IRD to be able to take my earnings and my property, my privacy before state officials first had to be disposed of; it was a given from the time the first Left dictatorian decided it was better that they, not I, should decide what was to be done with my money, just like in every police state from history. Albeit, let me put on record, the majority of IRD staffers I deal with daily are ‘good’ people, I have no complaint whatsoever on a personal/personable level; but this blog is about the principles involved. And don’t give me the Privacy Commission as a safeguard: a society only needs a Privacy Commission after it has first destroyed my privacy – it’s simply an admission of the crime already committed by the state, and the Commission is state run, so that’s no safeguard.

Although, as in the case of this trial, the (conservative) Right are worse, for they don’t even have the excuse of expediency (to my money): theirs appears to me to be simply the emoting of the vigilante delivering bush justice from the mob. It’s my major point of difference to the naming and shaming Whaleoil, wanting to deliver, I take it from his daily proverb, his Old Testament eye for an eye revenge. His advocacy of the ‘outing’ by naming, pre-verdict, as I believe is the position with NBR (?), shows that innocence or not doesn’t seem to play a part in their reasoning. And the argument that technology today makes privacy of the accused, but un-tried, impossible, is not an argument, it’s a cop out, because privacy is a moral issue, as is my freedom.

I believe there should be no cameras in court. I believe that we all are innocent until proven guilty, and that other than in the very rare case of public safety, to be decided by the police, all defendants before criminal trial should have name suppression unless, or until, proven guilty. That’s the civil and civilised society. Yes, we must have reporters in the court, as a check on corruption and to ensure the law is delivered without bias, but that need only be an embargoed print media, with proceedings  reported either only after a guilty verdict, or by withholding names in the case of innocence.

And as an aside, turning this issue back onto the themes of this blog, consider that as an alleged murderer, Ewen Macdonald still has more rights than a law abiding taxpayer before the IRD. The Crown must prove Macdonald murdered Scott Guy, the burden of proof is on the prosecutor, as it should be. If this were a tax case, it is reversed; the Crown would simply have sent him a statement saying guilty, with no reasons necessarily attached, and it would be up to him to prove his innocence. What sort of society does that to its law abiding citizens? (Answer: read my blog byline).

I hope through this blog I am starting to make my limited readership understand the nature of the brute-perfumed society we’ve voted in: it is the life forcibly lived in public; a police state, by most definitions, this scant regard for privacy being a major one of them. Take those damned cameras out of that court, and have the decency of a civil society for the Guys’ and Macdonalds’; their lives are hard enough, and angst nothing to do with us.


UPDATE:

Mind you, as bad as our privacy issues are, look at what they're doing in Britain. 

UPDATE II - 8th July, 2012:

Just for the record, following the privacy issues voiced in my above post, I note that the MSM have today hit a new low, by reporting messages left by Scott Guy's widow on his graveside. That's sheer tabloid. Shame on Granny Herald.