Rough justice.

Did Barry George kill Jill Dando? is the question being asked in some of the papers following the BBC's recent programme. Wrong question. There are only two ( or maybe three) people who possibly know the answer to that, and one of those is dead. No, the question is - should Barry George have been convicted of the killing of Jill Dando? We have a system - imperfect as all human systems are - whereby the prosecution lay their evidence before a group of impartial people - the jury - and if that evidence, having been tested under cross-examination, convinces the jury, they will find the accused guilty, otherwise not guilty. So the question is, was there sufficient evidence that a jury, doing its job properly, could say "we are convinced he did it". The evidence looked weak at the time, and the fact that the verdict was only by a majority of 10-2 certainly suggests that the case was far from clear-cut. But that's the way the system works. Like I say it's not perfect, and we have to accept that people will be convicted who didn't do what they are accused of, just as there will be people acquitted who did do what they are accused of. The thing is, what do we do when we think something might have gone wrong? The BBC programme didn't really come up with anything new - it basically simply highlighted the weaknesses of the original case, on which a jury has already delivered a verdict, a verdict which has been upheld on appeal. So where do we go from here? Tricky one, this.