Shamed Scottish judges

Across the world, feminist legal academics are bullying politicians and legislators into adopting new measures aimed at increasing rape convictions. The result, year after year, is justice systems increasingly tilted to favour accusers, undermining the right to a fair trial for men, and increasing the likelihood that innocent men will be convicted.

Scotland judges were doing well in this macabre race to the bottom, but now they have suffered a setback. A UK Supreme Court has warned that Scottish courts are violating a defendant's right to a fair trial. Scottish lawyers are claiming this could mean hundreds of men in prison will be lining up for appeals or possible compensation for false imprisonment.

It isn't so much the laws which have been at fault but the way Scottish judges are choosing to interpret them – namely by denying juries critical evidence that might have been used to exonerate the accused men.

They have taken rape shield laws, designed to protect the accuser from humiliating questions about their sexual history or character, and used these to exclude evidence critical to an understanding of what actually happened between the two people.

A leading Scottish barrister, Thomas Ross KC, has been outspoken about what is going on there. He's in a unique position to expose this injustice because, after handling over 100 rape cases, in 2022 he threw in the towel because he felt it was no longer possible to properly defend accused men. "I was just banging my head against a brick wall and getting nowhere." Ross decided he'd be better off walking away from this territory so he could speak publicly about what is going on.

He's now out there, describing in podcasts and interviews the ludicrous situation where defence lawyers have to submit all evidence they propose to use in court for approval prior to the trial. This includes all the questions they plan to ask, which is very useful, of course, for the complainant who has ample opportunity to adjust their own evidence to get their stories right.

Increasingly, questions the defence lawyers want to ask or evidence they wish to lead, are rejected by the court. Put simply, men simply aren't allowed to provide juries with relevant evidence critical to their defence.

Ross mentions a conversation with a father whose 18-year-old son was facing a rape trial. "The dad was looking at me as if to say, 'What kind of lawyer are you? This is my boy; he's going to jail. He's going in the sex offenders register. He is never going to get a job. I want this evidence laid out and you're telling me you're not going to be allowed to read it. That's on you. This is your fault. If you're the kind of lawyer that cannot get this evidence in, then you are clearly not up to it."

"I just couldn't do it anymore," said Ross. Many other lawyers agree with Ross that the situation has become intolerable, which is why the Law Society of Scotland sought leave to intervene in the UK Supreme Court case arguing men aren't getting the fair trials required by Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. And now, the UK Supreme Court, led by the most senior judge in the country, has agreed there is something very wrong in the way these trials have been conducted.

For other reasons, the UK judges unfortunately still sent to prison the two men who were the subjects of the appeal. One of these was Andrew Keir, who was sentenced to five years in prison for raping a drunk and sleeping woman at his home. But evidence withheld from the jury included CCTV footage showing an earlier drinking session at the pub where the woman, a work colleague of Keir, kissed him, and beckoned him into a disabled toilet. When they emerged, the couple were thrown out of the pub as it was assumed they had been having sex. Yet the CCTV footage was cut by the prosecutors to exclude all evidence of this earlier sexual contact.

There was a text message from Keir saying, "We went back and continued to have sex that we'd obviously had previously." This was doctored to read "We… have sex," as if it referred only to the alleged rape at Keir's house.

So here we have a justice system falsifying statements, doctoring CCTV footage and tampering with the evidence, rewriting the history of what happened that evening to suit the complainant's story.