I am beyond furious. It makes me wonder what is happening to our country. Like you I always felt that the trial of police sergeant Martyn Blake was a total injustice. We didn’t know the half of it.
Incredibly the Old Bailey judge had refused to allow the media to reveal that Chris Kaba, 24, was a violent gangster running a drugs gang in South London who had twice been involved in shootings only days before he was shot dead by Sgt Blake.
The fact that the media gag was only lifted yesterday after the Met made the good point to the judge that in the tinderbox that is London there might be some sympathy among the minority community for Kaba with the acquittal of the officer unless the truth were told.
In the almost 24 hours after the not guilty verdict when we didn’t know the reality of Kaba’s background the Black Lives Matter brigade and the Kaba family put out the PR that he was turning his life around.
The only thing he was turning round was the gun in his hand.
It was b*****ks. In fact, at Kaba’s inquest, well before the trial, the mum had tried to stop the coroner being told of his criminal past.
Literally Kaba had been a one-man crime wave since his teens.
I would like to focus on useless Judge Goss. He was the idiot who decided the juror should not know about Kaba’s shocking criminal past. In his ruling he said Kaba’s convictions and associations were irrelevant to the murder trial.
And for the 14 days of the trial the jury were left totally ignorant. Even so they came back in two hours and 59 minutes with a not guilty verdict. Had they known the truth they would have been back in 2.59 seconds.
At the end of the trial they sent a note to the judge asking if they could read a message. Yesterday a KC, on behalf of the media, asked in the interest of open justice if he would allow the note to be published. The judge refused.
This judge has been a nightmare. We, the public, should have known from Day One about Kaba. The secrecy misled us.
Instead of a murder charge Sgt Blake should have received a medal.