BOOKS
Brother Savage
B Y BERNARD LEVIN THE law is a ass,' said Mr. Bumble. 'And the . Worst I wish the law,' he added, 'is that he should have his eye opened by experience.' It Is a wish that anybody reading these two books* Would probably echo; the late Professor Harold Laski (who had no great love for judges in general, or Lord Goddard in particular) once told me that, finding himself seated next to Mr. Justice Avory at some public function, he had asked that aPpalling old man whether it was not true that he had, in the course of his judicial career, meted out Prison sentences adding up to something like 10,000 years. Yes, said Avory, he supposed it Would be roughly that. And had he ever, asked L..aski, been inside a prison? Never, said the judge snarpiy; the Home Office and Prison Commis- sioners had people for that purpose; why should he go? Whereupon they began to speak of golf; Avory was very fond of golf.
Lord Goddard has been inside a prison, if my Memory serves me correctly. There was a case not long ago, part of which hinged on certain matters said by a witness to have taken place in a prison; the jury having expressed a desire to visit the place themselves, to see whether the incident could have
ltaPPened as had been alleged, the judge accompanied them. Many would doubt, however,
Whether this was quite adequate; there is rather more to a case than law. It is true that Lord Goddard's law is generally quite good; though he iS far from being one of the great jurists, and is indeed inferior as a lawyer to some of his col- leagues on the Bench today, yet there is clearly, in all his work, evidence of an excellent legal mind, and the rarity with which one of his decisions is reversed on appeal is to be accounted for by some- thing more than the traditional reluctance of Judges to overturn the Lord Chief. The trouble vvith Lord Goddard begins precisely where his law books end; in so many of the things, apart from knowledge of statutes and case-history, which a judge ideally needs, the present Lord Chief Justice IS Woefully deficient. Most notorious of his blind sPots is his astonishing ignorance of mental abnormality; he told the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment that 'the whole conduct, including his demeanour and evidence' of Thomas John Ley, the Chalk-pit murderer, 'showed a tYpical case of paranoia,' a remark which, to any- body familiar with the amount and kind of work that is necessary before a trained psychiatrist can diagnose a 'typical case of paranoia' (whatever that might be), might well indicate a typical case of judge's intellectual megalomania.
Along with this deficiency goes the girlish emo- tionalism which seems to be his only reaction to such subjects as capital and corporal punishment. detailing to the House of Lords, during one ef the debates on hanging, two particularly dread- ful cases, he said of one (in which a man had raped
* 1-014) GODDARD,: His CAREER AND CASES. By Eric Grimshaw and Glyn Jones. (Wingate, 16s.) THE CmcLE OF GUtt.T. By Fredric Wertham. (Dob- son, 18s.) and mutilated an old woman whose house he was burgling), 'The prisoner, thank God, was not a British subject.' Of the other case, in which a man had kicked to death an old woman who swore at him and also raped her as she was dying, Lord Goddard said, '1 regret to say that this time the prisoner was a British subject.' What is so alarm- ing about this kind of emotional spasm is not that anybody should be so silly as to imagine that terrible crimes are more terrible when committed by British subjects, nor even (though this is bad enough) that these remarks should be made by the premier judge on the English bench, and a man who has nothing but a jury between him and the literal power of life and death. What is so shock- ing about it is that Lord Goddard's citing of these examples was prefaced by the astounding assertion that they were examples of murders `where there is no question of insanity.' That anybody in any judicial position at all should be so blinded by his feelings as seriously to believe that men capable of such acts are men in whose make-up 'there is no question of insanity' would be deplor- able; that a judge of Lord Goddard's rank should cleave to such fantastic beliefs is indeed a wretched blot on the English legal system, far outweighing such trivia as, for instance, the appallingly indiscreet vulgarity of his speech at a Royal Academy Banquet, in which he made puns on the two meanings of the word 'hanging' (and also, one might say, of his speech to the Savage Club, much of which seemed to be taken up by an interminable tale about a man who made lavatories), or his curious liking for what the authors of this sharp, unfriendly little study call 'masculine' or 'belly-laugh' stories, but which most of us know as dirty jokes.
And indeed, on the question of insanity in murder, Lord Goddard walks hand in hand with ignorance on one side of him and barbarism on the other; his ludicrous remarks about Thomas John Ley, cited above, were given a more deeply repulsive significance when he added, in reply to a question from a member of the Royal Commis- sion, 'I should have thought it very proper that he should have been hanged.' To maintain that a madman should be hanged for a murder com- mitted under the stress of his insanity (and remem- ber that Lord Goddard had himself just main- tained that Ley was mad) indicates not only an intolerably bloodstained attitude but a defective understanding of the elementary principle under- lying British law, that there should be no punish- ment without responsibility.
Still, it would be idle, even if agreeable, to maintain that Lord Goddard is, as far as general opinion goes, anything but typical. Muddled, nar- row, overwhelmingly emotional, with a belief, the roots of which he is a thousand light-years from understanding, in retributive punishment and the causing of physical pain to those who have caused it to others—in all this he represents only too well the attitudes of most people in the country whose judiciary he heads. Perhaps every country gets the Lord Chief Justice it deserves.
Certainly it gets the law it deserves; the law, after all, is only the expression of society's beliefs about the order that shall prevail. The break- down of law is not, as is usually maintained, a threat against society; it is a threat by society. The Volstead Act in the United States, for instance, was regarded and treated, long before Repeal, with almost universal contempt; there can be few such cases in history of a law persistently and deliberately broken by the great majority of a country's population from the chief executive downwards (the whole corpus of gambling legisla- tion in this country is in a like plight as far as public disesteem is concerned); but the lawlessness it engendered was only a reflection of that society's rejection of the law. Today, one of the greatest problems the United States faces is the staggering increase in every form of juvenile delinquency, and in particular juvenile violence.
Now Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose massive, brilliant and polemical study of horror-comics (Seduction of the Innocent) was a formidable indictment of a society which encourages violence and then reproves it, has published his thoughts on one particularly notorious case of juvenile killing, the Santana-Blankenship case; in this a member of a Puerto Rican gang in New York shot and killed a member of a rival, indigen- ous gang. To those familiar with Dr. Wertham's earlier case-studies, such as The Show of Violence, this is a little disappointing; it seems padded, and the cloven hoof of his partisanship shows un- comfortably clearly. Nevertheless, The Circle of Guilt makes a savage attack on the society in which such lawlessness as he is describing flourishes. For Dr. Wertham is concerned to examine the social and psychological condition- ing of criminals, which the law, in its blind mechanistic pursuit of the black and white of abstract 'justice,' so sadly ignores. Patiently Dr. Wertham takes us through the conditions of Puerto Rican immigrants into New York. through the incessant barrage of violence to which Ameri- can youth is subject, through the inadequate and wrongly directed educational and social-care facilities, through the murky jungle of prejudice, incompetence and ignorance in which the law is so sadly snarled. Inevitably, reading his sad indictment, one is driven back to the study of a judge who is far indeed removed from the world Dr. Wertham is depicting, except in the most vital sense of all : Lord Goddard, too, is his brother's keeper, and who can say that he has not failed, in his conception of his duty, in that most important charge?
Perhaps the most memorable passage in either of these books is the incident from the Craig- Bentley trial in which Lord Goddard questioned Craig about the knuckleduster he had given to Bentley before the fatal raid. Over and over again Lord Goddard wanted to know from him what the spike he had fixed to the weapon was for. The Lord Chief Justice, of course, knew perfectly well what it was for; it was to make the knuckle- duster inflict even more dreadful injuries on people against whom it was used than it would have done without the spike. Yet Lord Goddard returned again and again to his insistent 'What is that spike for?', heightening the atmosphere of crude emotionalism each time. In the question— and the manner of its asking—can be seen in microcosm all Lord Goddard's faults and virtues, all his revulsion against such wickedness and all his inability to apportion the blame for such wickedness rightly. As Dr. Wertham throws the pebbles of his indictment into the pool of society the circles of guilt spread farther and farther out, till the last ripple laps against the feet of every one of us. And Lord Goddard's are of clay.
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