It was one of those nights I just couldn't sleep, so I put on the radio hoping I would drift off with the background chatter. It didn't work because almost immediately the announcer informed us they were going live to Massachusetts for the original Louise Woodward verdict.
I had only vaguely followed the trial, but from what I had seen I more or less assumed she would be let off. Yet it wasn't the announcement of guilty that initially disturbed me I remember thinking, that's odd but the few seconds after when this poor young woman broke down in bewildered and inconsolable sobbing. The disembodied anguish pouring out of my radio upset me more then I would have thought possible. That a great wrong had been done had been brought home to me in one dramatic moment.
The next day and the days that have followed have been marked by the genuine outrage of more or less anyone I've talked to about the case, but also by a media outrage that has an awful stench of hypocrisy about it.
Suddenly the British press is up in arms about the American justice system. Make no mistake, they are right about that, and yet...where have they been as this same justice system has been handing out death penalties at unbelievably high rates. The state of Texas, for instance, was reckoned to be executing people throughout the last year at the same rate as Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
Have they been complaining at the astronomical levels of incarceration, levels that mean the state of California has more people locked up than the combined prison populations of several large European countries (including Britain)?
Where is the voice of the British media raised in anger at the fact that one in four young black men in the US will end up behind bars? Have they howled in protest at a 'three strikes and you're out' policy that saw someone getting life imprisonment for stealing a piece of pizza?
Actually no. As the horrors and absurdities of the American justice system have grown, the British media has demanded more and more tough sentencing from British courts. They have supported the mandatory sentencing policy of which, ironically, Louise Woodward has fallen foul. These hang 'em and flog 'em scribes are not well suited to the role of critics of American justice. Therefore they tend to want to see only superficial reasons for the failures of the system. Elected judges and prosecutors, and the televising of court cases, are being blamed.
Actually, my view is that the televising of Louise's case has helped her. Large numbers of people both here and in the US have not believed that justice has been done because what they have seen and heard does not look or sound like justice. As for electing judges, obviously they can be elected in a whipped up atmosphere of anti-crime hysteria, but are they any worse than their unelected British equivalents.
Here lies the second problem with the British media response it assumes a superiority of the British system. Guardian columnist Mark Lawson wrote a piece suggesting that politicians and lawyers etc from Massachusetts keep their opinions about British justice to themselves from now on. This was clearly a thinly veiled reference to the host of cases where Irish men and women were jailed for years for crimes they did not commit. Lest Lawson and the rest of us forget, these cases were the direct result of the absolute abuse of justice within the British system.
These were not cases where juries reached apparently incomprehensible decisions. On the contrary, thanks to the worst sort of collusion between police and prosecutors, under the all too acquiescent gaze of unelected judges, these people were fitted up so well juries were never likely to return anything other than guilty verdicts.
Who can forget how as the evidence mounted of these miscarriages politicians and the cream of the British judiciary again and again threw out appeals? One judge, Lord Denning, explained that even if the Birmingham Six were innocent, to admit it would reflect so badly on the British legal system that it was better to allow them to rot in prison.
In truth the British legal system is every bit as flawed as its American counterpart, the major difference being that its powers are not as draconian, yet the press that cries out for Louise Woodward is the same press that again and again wants to invest the British legal system with such powers.
One final thought: much has been made of the fact that Louise might have suffered because she was a foreigner, being tried in a foreign land. That is certainly a point worth considering. But will those in the press remember it when they keep demanding that Colonel Gadaffi hands over two Libyans to be tried for the Lockerbie bombing. For if a young, respectable and apparently harmless English woman cannot get justice in a foreign court, what hope do two young Arab men accused of terrorism and mass murder have? Very little I fear.
The cry of Louise Woodward is not one anyone who heard it is likely to forget, but if we are to be consistent then it should be heard as the cry of every innocent person who suffers at the hands of lousy legal systems, be they in Boston, London or Timbuktu.