Recently, Britain has been consumed with the case of two 10 year old girls abducted from the small Cambridgeshire town of Soham, and murdered. There have been a couple of arrests. One man will likely be charged with the girls' murder, but is now in a mental hospital and won't appear until deemed fit to stand trial. A woman, the man's fiancée, has been charged in court with perverting the course of justice.
Her court appearance in Peterborough showed mob-mentality at its worst. (See, for example, this coverage from the BBC, and this from the Guardian.) These people clearly didn't believe in the principle of being assumed innocent before being proven guilty, and were more than willing to scream at and abuse someone who isn't even being charged as an accomplice to her partner's crimes. Perverting the course of justice is a serious enough crime to warrant up to a life sentence, but this still strikes me as excessive. Worse still, some of the mob brought along their children. This really must be unhealthy. (Matt Seaton, in the Guardian on this.)
I can't help but think that a lot of reaction has been fuelled by non-stop media coverage. On one hand, there's probably an argument to the effect that the media can help in getting the public to come forward to the police, but this doesn't seem to have happened in this case. The frenzy seems reminiscent of what happened when Diana, Princess of Wales died.
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