Joanna Hughes - arsehole for today

"What were the CPS and the courts thinking?" she bleats in the Spectator. 

A mother jailed for retracting allegations of rape by her husband [1], (allegations she now says were truthful [2]) has been freed. A few days ago, appeal judges overturned the eight-month sentence of which she had served seventeen days, ordering her immediate release. A triumph for common sense and compassion, but why was she jailed in the first place? Yes, the CPS thought she’d lied under oath and invented a rape claim - and that’s serious – but, as it turns out, her husband intimidated her into retracting the claim [3]. 

1. Her husband made these allegations?
2. What possible legal weight can the retraction of a retraction of a serious accusation have?
3. If so, a crime. Is he being prosecuted? No? Then it's another unsupported allegation, isn't it?

And on it goes. The "violent" father refused to hand over his children to the woman's sister. Who says he is violent? Why the hell should he hand over his children to the sister of a woman who tried to put him in jail? Have the child welfare gestapo taken the children into care? No? Then he is clearly not an unfit father.

Ah, but Hughes has a woman's way of knowing, before which phallocentric concepts like evidence and logic pale into insignificance.

"It's a sad world where stringent justice has such savage consequences" says Hughes in closing. What "savage consequences"? That a perjurer should go to jail? Surely it's even sadder when perjurers do not go to jail.

I know no more than Hughes about the case, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary a woman tried to ruin her husband by making a very serious and false accusation against him. The way the justice system is set up today, he would have had to prove his innocence - a practical impossibility when it is no longer permissible to impugn the testimony of the alleged victim.

Then she changed her mind. Possibly all she wanted to do was scare him, but the police and the CPS are fully entitled to take a very austere view indeed of being dragged into a domestic on the basis of perjured testimony. So she was punished to deter other women from doing the same thing.

Shame they can't do the same for female journopukes who confer automatic victim status on "a mother" regardless of her actions. May we consider the possibility that her children might be better off without such a mother?