Post by jean on Mar 19, 2013 9:56:50 GMT
A barrister does not take instruction on how to conduct the defence from the client, it's the other way around.
There, you are quite simply wrong.
If VP had such a view of marriage that she felt it involved such utter subservience to her husband as would make any resistance to his will an impossibility for her, even if he wanted her to break the law, she would have indicated as much to her defence team.
If they advised her against it, it would be because they knew her view of marriage would not in itself be enough to establish coercion.
You're getting obsessively over-focussed on the "vow to obey" part of the jury's enquiry.
No, you were. It was you who introduced it, remember? The jury didn't mention it.
Either she gave the traditional vow, or she didn't.
As it turns out, she didn't.
And now that you've discovered that she didn't, you have to disregard it, obviously. But it was you who insisted on it in the first place.
If I'd been conducting her defence, the fact that you've unearthed that this was a Greek orthodox wedding would certainly have been a central plank of my argument. Such marriages are contracted with the explicit understanding that the couple are subsuming their individual identities into a unified partnership, where the will of both is enjoined to be secondary to the interests of the coupled unit.
No Christian marriage enjoins breaking the law, however much it might be in the couple's collective interest that one or other of them do so.
You appear to be arguing now that no coercion was necessary - that the couple's concept of marriage should be enough to supply a defence for her breaking the law.
But the defence of marital coeccion requires coercion. That still has to be proved. In law, coercion is not a given from the mere fact of a couple's being married, even if they have some metaphysical one flesh idea of their union.
(FTR I believe that coercion should be a mitigation, though probably only rarely a defence, available to anyone in any sort of close relationship where pressure might be brought to 'overbear will.' It's the marital coercion that's an anachronistic nonsense.)
But of course you were not in court, and in your obsessive over-focussing on the nature of marriage as it might appear to the married you are ignoring other evidence, or lack of it.
For the defence of marital coercion to stick, the husband has to be present at the time the offence was committed.
There was no corroborating evidence that Huhne was present when Pryce signed the paper. No-one else was there. No-one remembered.
The second jury chose to believe Pryce was lying.