Panic sets the guilty free

The Guardian reports an 18 year-old man has been cleared of setting a fire in Salford during the riots:

A teenager who spent nine days in prison after being charged with setting fire to Miss Selfridge during the Manchester riots has been cleared after new evidence emerged confirming his innocence.

Dane Williamson, 18, said he had had a nightmarish ordeal after he was charged with being involved in causing £500,000 damage to the Market Street store during the riots, despite having five alibis.

He was charged with criminal damage and being reckless over property damage or endangering life. His name was widely reported and Facebook groups were set up on which he was identified and subjected to abuse.

Williamson's flat in Salford was damaged by fire while he was on remand in Forest Bank prison; he lost all of his possessions and is now homeless. He suffered panic attacks after he was targeted by other prisoners who taunted him about what he had supposedly done.

These are the cases we need to keep in mind when the Prime Minister and the media talk about rough justice for the rioters. Too often people still fall into the frame of thinking that evidence and correct investigation is somehow a gift to criminals, or about their 'rights,' when it's actually about sussing out the son of a bitch responsible. Dane Williamson was one of the usual suspects — young, had spent most of his life in care with two previous convictions — and he kind of looked like one of the rioters captured on CCTV. A little extra investigation revealed that his clothing wasn't the same as the arsonist and another polic officer had already identified someone different as the suspect.

So the slow methodical justice of the courts prevented an innocent man's life being destroyed (at a cost to us of around £40 000 a year.) More importantly the police are still on the hunt for the real suspect. Had passion overruled procedure we might as well have been patting the real arsonist on the back and sending him on his way.