The Tyranny of Good Intentions
How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice
chapter one
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THE LAW AS SHIELD:
THE RIGHTS OF ENGLISHMEN
Four years into the “devil’s decade” of the 1930s, a period of high unemployment, a series of articles in the London Times on depressed regions within England pierced the British conscience. Among the “Places without a Future” were the once prosperous coal fields of Durham in northeast England, which had a 37 percent unemployment rate.
County Durham wasn’t a pretty picture. Herbert Pike Pease Daryngton, a member of the British House of Lords, wrote a letter to the Times saying that “your articles on ‘Desolate Durham’ are moving beyond words.” Indeed they were. The coal pits, which had supported densely populated villages in which miners lived with their families in small row houses, were closed, leaving the inhabitants of entire precincts unemployed. A miner’s weekly dole payment was the only thing standing between his family and starvation.
Economic li ...
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