The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill contains unnecessary defensive measures, says Dr Jonathan Rogers
In October 2007, the secretary of state for justice, Jack Straw, promised the Labour Party conference that he would introduce new legislation on the use of force in self-defence and crime prevention. He was concerned that citizens were not doing enough to help each other when there was trouble on the streets. He admitted that “the law on self-defence works much better than most people think” but suggested that it “could or should” do better.
Many lawyers must have wondered how he thought the law could be changed. Indeed, Straw’s main complaint seemed to be not the substantive law of crime prevention, but rather the stark reality that the “have-a-go hero” might himself be arrested for injuring the villain. But there is no way of avoiding the inconvenience of arrest when the facts of a violent incident are still unclear, as they almost invariably are in its immediate aftermath, and the police would violate the right to life of a deceased villain if they were not seriously to investigate
