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GEE WHIZZ! JUDGE FOR YOURSELF?
(or not, as the case may be)

By

Joe Lloyd

(Source)

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ADDENDUM (written later, although placed before!)

According to The Times of 18 December 1999 Judge Richard Gee has avoided the threat of dismissal by retiring!

Judge Gee, who is now 57 years old, and for the last four years, while on suspension, has been paid his full salary of £92,810 a year, will after he reaches the age of 65 receive an inflation-proofed pension of £23,000 a year, and a lump sum of £46,000. Apparently the Lord Chancellor has no power to prevent the pension operating. Judge Gee wrote his letter of resignation on 22 November 1999.

It appears that there is still an on-going investigation into claims that Gee falsified claims for Legal Aid, although time appears to be of no special importance in regard to that aspect...

END OF ADDENDUM

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On 13 October 1998, the day that it became public knowledge that Judge Gee had experienced the delightful surprise of being let off entirely from the legal proceedings in court against him that were actually taking place at the time, in connection with a massive fraud, because he was feeling depressed and stressed to find himself in the position of being tried for a crime, I sent the following letter to The Times newspaper in London.
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"To The Editor

Dear Sir

How can the public be expected to have any trust in the fairness of the law when apparent travesties like the Gee caper are allowed to take place?

It seems unsurprising that the Judge was “moderately severely depressed”. After all, apart from facing a public trial, he had not been allowed to do his job for the last three years, since his arrest, and it must have added to his woes when he remembered that he was "forced" to accept his full wages of £86,000 or so per annum without being allowed to do his job.

"Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all."

Although expected standards seem to have fallen in recent years, it used to be accepted that if an upholder of the law, a policeman, for example, stole a gallon of petrol from a parked car, he not only lost his job with the police for ever, but went to jail as well, because of the higher standard required of a person in his position.

Nowadays, though, it seems that the one who is not being dishonest in some way is derided as a cissy! If a judge is discovered to have flouted the law, particularly in the most flagrant, consistent and calculated way that Gee was said to have employed, he should really have been set adrift in the Arctic in a rowing boat, at the very least, purely pour encourager les autres..

Surprisingly, though, the medical evidence for the prosecution also came to the conclusion that Gee was depressed. Could some members of the prosecution “team” have belonged to the same lodge?

Would the position have been the same, one is compelled to ask, if the fraudster had been a window cleaner or an office boy?

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It brings to mind the misfortune of Saunders, in the Guinness trial. He was spared at the end, because his medical advisers stated that he was suffering from Altzeimers Disease, which is incurable, and was not expected to survive for long. That was a quite a time ago by now. It seems that he is as fit as a fiddle, after all, and enjoying life to the full again. In fact, Mr Saunders fairly recently boasted publicly that he “had never felt better”. Is this what is meant by cocking a snook?

How strange that nobody seems to notice anything unusual about such things. But there are laws about perjury, which makes it an imprisonable offence to give false evidence to a court, or to write false things and swear that they are true. A medical affidavit is an example.

It seems that these laws don't apply to everyone.

Isn't that really odd?

Doesn't it make you wonder whether there is something a bit sick surrounding those who close their eyes to certain things which clearly need further examination?

It makes me wonder what is wrong with us all. With such a degree of apparent corruption in our legal system is it surprising that the Libyans have understandable doubts about the possibility of obtaining a fair trial in this country?

Wasn’t it Jack Straw who, a year or so ago, was insisting on Judges and the rest of the legal hoodlums being compelled to declare their membership of secret societies, so that the public could feel reassured about their expectations of justice in our courts? I suppose that he has been warned off, for no perceptible change seems to have taken place.

I have just noticed that on another page your paper mentions that 200 judges have admitted membership of the freemason band, and “about” another fifty have refused to say! The latter must be very shy judges.

Incidentally, many must have noticed that in the colour picture on your front page, Judge Gee, wearing his wig, looks remarkably like Jasper Carrot.

Yours, etc"

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My letter was not published, although there did appear one or two short, gentle letters about the matter in the correspondence columns of The Times the following day.

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Just in case you missed it, it seems that Judge Gee, with two others (who were solicitors) was accused of perpetrating a rewarding crime which, broadly, consisted of making some millions of pounds worth of ill-gotten gains by means of a fairly (but not very) intelligent scheme of defrauding Building Societies by inventing Borrowers/Mortgagors who were supposed to be residing in blocks of flats which had been obtained for the purpose. Quite clever and sophisticated for crooks, I suppose. This had gone on for some years.

Judge Gee's two accomplices ("co-conspirators") had been tried, found guilty, and sent to prison two or three years ago, but Judge Gee's trial had, for some reason, been postponed until the hue and cry had died down.

One of Judge Gee's jailed accomplices had actually died since the former trial, but enough time had passed, one would assume, for the powers-that-be to have reached the conclusion that the immediate "shock/horror" public awareness period would have passed.

It may be worth mentioning that, according to the report, Judge Gee's American wife was also looking very stressed. Wouldn't this be expected, as being quite normal for any crooks whose misdeeds had been discovered? One cannot help wondering why such a huge and noticeable exception was made in the case of Judge Gee.

Judge Gee was not an elderly man, and in fact looked quite perky after the trial had been abandoned, and from the photograph in The Times appeared to lost all signs of stress within a few minutes of leaving the court.

It could be interesting to hear whether the survivor of the two jailed accomplices of Judge Gee felt as happy and relieved at the outcome as Judge Gee and his wife must have done!

(Unlikely, of course, taking into account the fact that Judge Gee and his wife had just enjoyed two years or so of happy holidays in the United States on full Judges's pay!)

Further reading:

Of Judicature - Francis Bacon