The inquest delivered the basic justice people had waited 27 years for but a detached judge and police repetition of mature,putrid claims prolonged the nightmareThe overwhelming majority of people in contemporary Britain will never be addressed as sir, ma’am, and my lord in their whole working lives. Yet in the places the public pays for to protect our most fundamental rights and preserve the rule of law and justice,the hierarchies and manners of another age prevail. During two years at the inquests where the Hillsborough families sought basic justice yet again, the constant requirement of formalities risked being more than grating: it can seem to institutionalise detachment.
The judiciary appears actually to believe that inquests are more people-friendly than tall courts, or mainly,it seems, because they are mercifully free of wigs. But the process remains formally divorced from normal life. To witness the workings of the upper echelons of the justice class on a trade park in Warrington off the M62, and hearing the most grounded,loving of families’ need for the truth approximately their loved ones’ deaths, was unnerving from the start. Only in courts, or there to serve the public yet somehow so inaccessible,is a boss required to be called sir by all other adults every single time they speak to him.
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Source: theguardian.com