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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

What's crazy about his case is that he was sentenced to more time than somebody who just outright named an accuser on twitter.

Leonna Dorrian should be disbarred. What she did was a blatant abuse of her power.

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Yeah that judgement was crazy. It has been spun as being about protecting the identity of victims of sexual offences, but I don't believe that for a moment because the judgement contained a detailed account of how you could find the accusers from Murray's articles. So I personally had no idea who they were when I read his article originally, but it was easy to figure out from the judgement. If what they cared about was protecting the identities, the judgement would never have been written that way.

IIRC the argument was that by "identifying" the supposed victims he "could have" prejudiced the trial.

The UK has exceptionally strict laws surrounding interference with an ongoing trial. It's much easier to get somebody on that than it is most crimes if you're motivated.

The judge seems to have been lashing out after failing to convict Alex Salmond and reading the blog posts which lampooned her. They didn't come after him while the trial was in progress.

Tommy Robinson was also convicted on similar charges of attempting to prejudice a trial.

Not only this. Before the criminal trial there were no restrictions on reporting the identity of the accusers. Murray had even pointed this out in his affidavit to the court that he had chosen not to though it would have been quite legitimate to do so at that time.

I'm not surprised. I haven't had much faith in the system protecting identities since the time I had to move for witness protection only to find my new address revealed to all parties in the summons to the hearing.

I'm English, and pretty far from Murray politically, but from what I've read in other places as well the Scottish Government, the SNP, and the Scottish judiciary seem very close - probably too close.

The Scottish Government is the most useless, unnecessary body imaginable. The only office less important then that of the First Minister must be the Vice President in the US. It's not surprising that petty officials will abuse their power as much as they can.

The fundamental problem is that there is no separation of powers between the government and the judiciary as you might find in most (all?) modern democracies. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) acts as the governments lawyers and the prosecution service. Most of the accusers in the trial of Alex Salmond, for which he was acquitted on all charges, are close associates of the leadership of the Scottish National Party which are currently in power in the devolved parliament. The risks are clear and obvious.

Isn’t that one of the definitions of dictatorships in other non-white countries according to neocon NGO/CIA/white savior class. The separation of powers that may exist de jure but no de facto when it comes to the power structure like in the US.

I'm a bit confused by this statement about separation of powers. The function of a prosecutor is not a judicial function in the context of an adversarial legal system such as the common law.

Moreover, how is this really different from the CPS in the rest of the UK?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prosecution_Service

"The Attorney General for England and Wales superintends the CPS's work and answers for it in Parliament, although the Attorney General has no influence over the conduct of prosecutions, except when national security is an issue or for a small number of offences that require the Attorney General's permission to prosecute."

So yeah, it's much more arms-length than Scotland.

True, but I think choosing which cases to prosecute (or not prosecute) based on political expediency rather than weight of evidence could be the danger here.

The notion that (theoretically independent in either case) prosecutors who are part of the judicial branch rather than the executive branch are less likely to be influenced by political considerations is worth examining. I have real doubts it is valid.

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