“To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice” – these hallowed words, from the Great Charter of Liberties popularly known as the Magna Carta, stands etched in the glass-panel doors in the lobby of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Next to them is the text of the judicial oath, in which the appointee swears to “do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will”. From the plains of Runnymede to the old Middlesex Guildhall runs a golden thread through English law: that of liberty under the law, fairly administered by impartial justices who are accountable to the Crown, the law and their conscience.

Perhaps, then, the critics of Mr Justice Cooke, who sentenced Sarah Catt to eight years, should re-acquaint themselves with these words.

The ink on the judgment wasn’t dry ere the defenders of a woman’s God(dess)-given right to poison her offspring have stepped up to the plate and launched their assault on Cooke J, and soon enough the left-wing media outlets were painting him as a sort of Christian Ayatollah Khomeini sans beard and with a wig in lieu of a turban.

Was it based on his sentencing remarks making extensive reliance on Christian doctrine? No – the sentencing remarks don’t even make reference to God, the child’s innate right to life or, you know, that pesky thing about how thou shall not kill. Or was the witch-hunt against Cooke J based on his unusually heavy sentence, as the Guardian’s Ms Bancroft suggests? No – in fact, the proper comparator was, as Cooke J noted, that of murder/manslaughter, had the child been born alive a few days later. Eight years, of which four will be spent in confinement (a fact stated clear as day in the last paragraph of the sentencing remarks, but conveniently obscured by the critics of the judgment), are a paltry sum when considering how technical and formalistic the difference between the unborn child mere days before due date and a newborn capable of being the victim of murder is. No, Cooke J’s grave sin was his membership of theLawyers’ Christian Fellowship, an ecumenical organisation of Christian lawyers established with sinister aims like “serving God in the legal profession”.

Cue the influx of hit pieces. Simon Jenkins accuses the judge of “abhorrent rage”, a medieval attitude and “judicial machismo” for daring to jail someone who has actually only extinguished another life. Elizabeth Prochaska was more overt about her allegations that Cooke J may have lacked impartiality and Ben Quinn and Owen Bowcott gave a thorough expose of the LCFbeing linked to just about any nasty thing ending with -phobia.

I’ve had to explain to my less fortunate friends, family and acquaintances – that is, those not in the legal profession – several times over the weekend why I was fuming with rage about these cowardly, insinuating pieces of empty innuendo-mongery. The Guardian didn’t just insult Cooke J (which they couldn’t give a damn about), they insulted the entire judiciary, and indeed the entire legal community.

Their view of a man’s mind being so simplistic as to be unable to reconcile a duty to impartiality with faith or participation in a faith-related professional group is staggeringly, well, medieval. Their unsaid words: Christians, or those who openly practice any religion, are unsuitable to be in the judiciary, or even the legal profession on the whole. Christians in the judiciary are Britain’s slippery slope to our own brand of Christian wilayat al-faqih, and puts us one step away from the theocrats of 1979. These aren’t their words, but they are the necessary consequences of their words. If we become a society where a judge with religious beliefs is ‘fair game’, where the media can go after a member of the judiciary who swore to to administer law without ‘fear or favour, affection or ill-will’, merely based on his faith and participation in a faith-based professional group, all bets are off. Don’t like your judgment? Object to the judge. Never mind that most of them come from a profession where they might well have had to plead on behalf of clients whose views they found unsavoury – the cab rank rule, which Lord Irvine called one of the singular glories of the Bar, means that barristers have to take cases as long as the client is willing to pay and they are competent in the area of law. Never mind that most of them have had years, if not decades, behind the bench and any bias would have long become evident and led to heavy reprimands. Never mind that the judiciary is still reeling from the fallout of the Pinochet debacle, which led judges to assiduously declare interests in any and all organisations. Never mind the fact that the law has a very clear definition of bias applicable to decision-makers, and had Cooke J indeed been the bewigged Khomeini that he is painted as, Ms Catt’s lawyers would long have mounted a challenge.

Never mind all that – what the Guardian’s disgusting and singularly undemocratic campaign against a distinguished member of the judiciary is about is to rid the judiciary of anyone who might, just might, have anything but their strict positive-secular views, to be replaced by some distorted new man-ideal like the Soviet man. Then they’ll come for people with unpalatable political views next. Then for judges who went to public school. And then it’s open season on anyone – and on justice. The judiciary will become a place of fear and terror where all discourse, conversation and intellectual activity is chilled by the fear that citing the “wrong” source, mentioning the “wrong” idea (that is, one rooted in religious morality) or having the “wrong” thoughts would lay one’s chest bare to the arrows of the lynch mob.

That is, until the judiciary and the legal community stops indulging this nonsense – which, I hope, happens before it’s too late. There is no adequate response to this but a wholesale rejection of the criticisms leveled at Cooke J – not because one has to agree with the judgment, but because no democratic society can prevail where the media arrogates to itself the privilege to crucify a distinguished judge in its vain endeavour to make the narrative about everything but what it really is: a sad story of a woman who murdered her child – not the Spanish Inquisition.

Which, as we know, nobody expects. But it’s coming. Applicants for Grand Inquisitor Torquemada’s role are encouraged to apply at the Guardian.

Frankie September 25, 2012 at 21:04

I thought she got off lightly, the murdering bitch… Bring back the
rope!

UK Fred September 26, 2012 at 19:49

I’d agree, Frankie. But I would do that from the point at which a
pregnancy test proved positive.

minktulip September 25, 2012 at 11:56

The judiciary itself is much to blame in this. Many judges seek the
approbation of the intelligentsia, as do most politicians. The result is a
country bent and twisted by intellectual tyrants. Nothing can stop this except
a written constitution.

JuliaM September
25, 2012 at 19:06

America has one of those. Hasn’t really done much more than slow the
progressives down a little…

cascadian
September 26, 2012 at 03:06

Same argument really Julia-the feminists whine it was written many
years ago by white, old, guys (I like to call them WOG’s) and must
therefore be wrong and non-applicable to their very precious
circumstances.

Justice Cooke is obviously a WOG and is therefore unequipped to comment
on feminist dogma.

On the whinometer this is an 8, had she been scouse it could easily be
an 11.

minktulip
September 26, 2012 at 20:00

I find it heartening to see citizens in the USA successfully
challenging aggressive police. And it’s a much better country for
freedom of speech. Not much, perhaps, but still, a place to make a
stand.

M Barnes September 25, 2012 at 09:58

I didn’t read the articles mentioned becasue it seemed to me that they were
using a rotting red herring to attack a legal slam dunk. The law on abortion
is quite clear (I support abortion BTW) and this woman broke it and then there
are the aggravating circumstance of her not revealing where the childs body
is. To be prefectly blunt, there is no way of knowing if the poor child was
born alive and then killed. Dreadful business.
With regards the argument of
the article- wholeheartedly agree. I am an atheist and to pretend that
religion does not permeate our judiciary and our societies way of rubbing
along together is a nonsense. Oh, I don’t think the christians invented the
rule book – they just codified it. Thou shalt not kill strikes me as a good
general rule for any society and to pretend non-christian societies didn’t
have it is stupid, just as it’s stupid to pretend that christians didn’t break
those rules as and when it suited ( as did the non-C’s).
Really all these
horrifed writers were just grasping at straws because their devotion to
‘women’s causes’ is blind – and, ironcially enough, astonishingly patronising.
Let me guess their general tone towards Mrs Catt: poor woman, how desperate
she must have been, how uncaring is this patriarchial judiciary, women
internalise these conflicts more than men because society doesn’t let them
express their rage. Bollocks. I happen to regard myself as a feminist too
(gosh that’s a lot of labels this morning). Let me be clear – women are not
universally good and pure. They are just as capable of murder, robbery, sexual
assult, emotional and physical abuse, being serial killers, as men. The
incidence may be lower (or they get caught less) but it is nevertheless a
potential. All that ‘poor woman’ nonsense is just as pompous and belittling as
any male sexist rubbish about ‘women should be laydies’. Here endeth the rant.
Going for a coffee – home made expresso dammit – none of this costa coffee
sludge.

Brass Monkey
September 25, 2012 at 18:47

Dead right about the devotion to women’s causes. The trouble is that
these days the frminists are so used to getting their own way because men
have become gutless, spineless creatures that any term of imprisonment
handed down by a male judge is bound to make them howl with rage, and then
revert to typical leftie smear campaigns. To see what one woman thinks of
the current dominance of women over men try http://thebattlefieldoflove.blogspot.co.uk/.

m.barnes
September 26, 2012 at 18:09

Just as not all monkeys are brass, so not all feminists are of the
lesser-spotted gruaniad variety

UK Fred
September 26, 2012 at 19:48

Sorry, M. Barnes, but the noise is coming out the wrong end of your
digestive tract. Feminism is a sub-branch of Marxism. It is the cause of
what some on the other side of the Pond are now calling ‘bureaugamy’
defined as the situation in which a woman depends not on one (monogamy)
nor more than one (polygamy) husbands but on the state to put right all
her problems.

Mike September 25, 2012 at 09:26

Apart from one nit pick, an excellent post. What is being questioned by the
chattering classes is why we should have a Judaeo-Christian based morality and
hence legal system. It is far more than an attack on one judge, it is a
fundamental attack on our society’s values.
(the nit pick, Cardinal
Torquemada was a devout man who started as a Dominican friar. Did you mean his
nephew Tomas who was not a cardinal but was Spanish Grand Inquisitor?)

Chris September
25, 2012 at 10:00

Indeed, Mike, I meant Tomas, not Juan. Thank you — corrected.

JohnB September 25, 2012 at 09:22

I was brought up in a purely scientific household and I truly could never
really understand morality of any sort.
(Which would include Soviet-style
morality or any form of good/bad judgements.)
I have since come to think
that a lot of solid human decency, in fact the whole generally-accepted
western approach, has its roots in the Judaic-Christian tradition.
I do
worry about the human race thinking it can be its own yardstick.

GildasTheMonk
September 25, 2012 at 06:57

Bravo, superb on so many levels – and oh so accurate. However, I would have
given the woman 15 – if I had the sentancing power to do it.

Ted Treen September 25, 2012 at 12:53

Only 15?

Softy…

JuliaM September
25, 2012 at 05:15

Mixed in with the desire for ‘strict positive-secular views’ is also the
‘no-one should ever go to prison!’ crowd’s loopy ideas, which always get an
airing when it’s a female convicted of a crime, as per this comment to
Amanda’s article:

“Only those blinded by ideological dogmatism will fail to recognise that
Sarah Catt’s made decisions borne of a desperation that is difficult to
comprehend. She made a terrible, terrible decision… one that would have
haunted her for the rest of her life regardless of the court’s decision.

That our society’s response to her circumstances is lengthy imprisonment is
a complete indictment of any claim we have to be considered civilised and
tolerant. “

The idea that we should be ‘tolerant’ of what is (at best) illegal
late-term abortion and possibly infanticide is breathtaking. Let alone any
other crimes. But we should do it for the chiiillldreeeeen!

Chris September
25, 2012 at 08:29

Her anguish and desperation would be a lot more understandable, had she
not a history of changing her mind quite late — with one child given up for
adoption, another aborted and yet another only born because it was beyond
the term limit (and, presumably, misoprostol wasn’t readily available over
the internet at the time).

JuliaM September 25, 2012 at 10:18

It does rather suggest a lax attitude to the benefits of
contraception…

Robert the
Biker September 25, 2012 at 13:39

I think they may have confused ‘doing it FOR the children’ and ‘doing it
TO the children’
Glad this worthless bitch is banged up and hopefully her
hubbie will take stock of what he married and clear out before she is
released,

Engineer September 24, 2012 at 21:50

One wonders if the Grauniad commentators would be so outraged had the judge
been of the Muslim faith, and had delivered the same summing up.

I thought one of the good points about faith was that provided a moral
framework. I’m no expert on the law, but I understood that much of English law
was based on the moral codes layed down about a millenium ago in a broadly
Christian country. To decry that so violently now seems to be trashing a
thousand years of steadily evolving heritage and tradition, of which tolerance
(notably of the spiritual beliefs of others) is an important part.

JuliaM September
25, 2012 at 05:09

My god, can you imagine the CiF columns had anyone dared to accuse
a Muslim judge of this?!

Ted Treen
September 25, 2012 at 12:51

Only Christians can be dogma-led and religiously intolerant – in much
the same way that only whites can be racist…

Michael September 24, 2012 at 21:34

Anyone would think that our legal code arrived here in a capsule from outer
space. If the judge is biased in favour of the ethical, moral, spiritual and
historical foundations of our present legal system I’m struggling to see the
problem.