Ross Clark
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Given that these allegations were never put before court, Jenkins has never had the opportunity properly to respond to them. But there are very good reasons for the judges in the latter two of Jenkins’s trials to decide they were inadmissible. Jenkins was facing a murder charge, not a divorce case. However horrid he might or might not have been towards his wife, slapping one’s spouse or having an affair does not automatically lead to battering a 13-year-old girl over the head with a tent peg; if it did, the child murder rate would be many times higher than it is. Moreover, Lois only made her accusations of marital violence after being convinced that her husband had murdered Billie-Jo, in particular during an appeal hearing in 2004, six years after the original trial, by which time she was living in Tasmania with another man. One cannot entirely dismiss them even if she did fail to complain about Sion Jenkins’s temper tantrums at the time: it is not an unknown phenomenon, as Theodore Dalrymple has frequently described in these pages, for battered women pathetically to defend the husbands who have been battering them. But to condemn a man to a life sentence on the basis of the way an embittered ex-wife says he mistreated her many years earlier?
Contrary to the assertion by the tabloids that Jenkins would now be safely behind bars had the juries in the latter two of his three trials not had important evidence withheld from them, the juries were presented with ample other evidence as to Jenkins’s character, but decided that it did not convince them he is a murderer. They knew that he had lied on his CV about going to Gordonstoun, and they were told by a former neighbour of the Jenkinses that Sion Jenkins had kicked Billie-Jo in the leg when he suspected she was malingering over an injured ankle. Appalling though Jenkins’s behaviour might have been on this occasion, it still does not get us any closer to the issue which really matters: whether he committed the murder or not. Only one piece of substantial evidence was ever presented by the prosecution to try to prove this: the presence of 158 microscopic spots of Billie-Jo’s blood found on Sion Jenkins’s fleece. But then, as the court was told in the latter two trials, there was an innocent explanation for this: that the dead girl could have showered Jenkins in a dying breath as he attended to her. Moreover, one has a faint suspicion that battering somebody over the head with a tent peg so hard that it shatters their skull might just leave one covered with rather more than microscopic spots of blood.
It would be reassuring to think, no matter what the tabloids said, that the law could always be relied upon to distinguish between actual evidence for the crime being considered and tittle-tattle about a suspect’s past behaviour. Unfortunately, legal process is moving towards the tabloids’ approach to justice. The Jenkins case has highlighted a little commented-upon change in the law under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which permits use of ‘bad character’ evidence in criminal trials. In future, juries will be fed much more in the way of previous affairs, acts of dishonesty and errors of judgment which have nothing to do with the crime under consideration, and invited to draw conclusions.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see where this could lead: accused of rape and with little evidence to prove it, the prosecution is now free to contact your spurned girlfriends for comment and to cite in court any visit you might have made to a porn website. Accused of causing death in a hit-and-run accident and with no direct evidence that you or your vehicle were actually involved, the prosecution can now in theory trawl up your every speeding fine and the time you tried to hoodwink a traffic warden into believing you had only parked on a double yellow for two minutes while you popped into the chemist to pick up a prescription for your dying granny.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that so far there has been a rush of miscarriages of justice as a result of the 2003 Act. Nevertheless, the provisions which enable character evidence to be brought before the courts are there on the statute book, and it is fair to assume that the tabloids will remind us of them any time a prisoner with a slightly dodgy past is acquitted of a crime. In future, anyone accused of a crime — rather like in a Lib Dem leadership election — will find their entire lifestyle and habits on trial. We are approaching the world of Albert Camus’s Outsider, where a man is condemned to death not so much because he killed a stranger — which he maintains was done in self-defence — but because he failed to cry at his mother’s funeral. A similar accusation has been levelled at Sion Jenkins in recent days: that he was too calm and ‘detached’ and failed to demonstrate sufficient grief on the recording of his 999 call after Billie-Jo’s death.
Ever since the death of the Princess of Wales we have been evolving into an emotionally incontinent society, where we are expected to start blubbing on cue, whenever the situation demands. But if it comes to murder suspects being sent down for life on the basis that they have failed to conform to the ‘correct’ emotions, or indeed as a result of any other perceived character flaws, it will be a sad day for justice.
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