Article
Yes, the law can be an ass
Cynical old hacks on travel junkets will write that a fly-blown hotel in Bongo Congo is the new honeymoon hotspot in exchange for beer nuts and access to an airline executive lounge.
Subeditors usually have criminal records and cannot be trusted to enter public spaces during daylight hours. They are kept in darkened rooms where they are fed swill laced with animal tranquillisers in return for writing pun headlines.
Photographers have pupils the size of pinheads, wear jeans made by prison inmates and appear to live on a diet of adrenaline, sugary drinks and salt-and-vinegar crisps. They all drive cars very fast and several actually have licences.
And yet there is a handful in the trade who can be considered craftsmen; journalists such as Les Carlyon, Harry Gordon and Evan Whitton have been the moral compass for those who have followed for decades.
Whitton is a self-declared reptile of the press who learnt his trade at the now-defunct Melbourne Truth. He wrote consumer affairs stories and dabbled, as he put it, in crafting ”soft porn” for the masses.
Someone had to do it.
While the more respectable daily papers ignored or lampooned corruption whistleblower Dr Bertram Wainer, Whitton helped find him forums to air his revelations that some of the state’s best-known detectives accepted bribes from abortionists.
Wainer’s campaigns resulted in not one but two royal commissions on police, the Kaye inquiry (1970) and the Beach inquiry (1975-76).
Whitton has spent 30 years covering crime, corruption and courts, using a keen eye, an inquisitive mind and rare research talents to produce unique essays that shine lights into dark places. His opinions are backed by facts, and the former journalist of the year has concluded our court system is irreparably broken.
Even more startlingly, he has discovered there is something morally lower than a working hack from the press: criminal lawyers. It would appear he believes such creatures think that Integrity is a small island in the South Pacific and Scruples a board game played following after-dinner mints.
He argues in his new book Our Corrupt Legal System, Where Everyone is a Victim (Except Rich Criminals) that the British adversarial system has failed and we should move to the European inquisitorial model.
He says the European system is cleaner and less open to abuse than our present process, which is unnecessarily complicated and designed not to discover but to hide the truth. He believes lawyers, judges and politicians (many of them former lawyers) are wedded to a process that is too expensive and fails too often.
He writes that the European model empowers judges to find evidence and discourages lawyers from concealing it. Trials are quicker and more just.
Our Corrupt Legal System, Where Everyone Is A Victim (Except Rich Criminals) By Evan Whitton. Book Pal.
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