Two completely separate dramas are taking place right now on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side the former President, Donald Trump, is facing a possible criminal charge that he was involved in and approved a payout to a porn star that he had slept with when his wife was pregnant and he was running for the Presidency of the United States. The allegation on which the possible criminal charge is based is whether the money that was used to pay the porn star off came from campaign funds. If that is true then the former President faces a jail term . Wouldn't that be something if Trump lost the case!?
On the other side of the ocean former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing a charge that he deliberately misled Parliament over some parties that were hosted in his name at No. 10 Downing Street during the pandemic, and that these parties breached the lockdown rules set and approved by the former Prime Minister himself and that he (Johnson) deliberately misled Parliament when he said that the lockdown rules were never breached. (Incidentally, this has turned out to be untrue but the ex-PM has said in his defence that he didn't intentionally mislead Parliament when he said that the rules were never breached. In other words, there was no intention on his part to mislead.)
Now, in criminal law there are two parts to proving beyond reasonable doubt that a crime has been committed: one part is the act itself - the actus reus - and the other is the intention - the mens rea. That is why, for example, there is a difference between murder and manslaughter. In murder there is the fact that a person has been killed and the intention was to kill him. In manslaughter, a man has been killed but there was no intention to kill, though it was reasonably foreseeable that death would have resulted from the particular act.
In both of these cases the intention of the alleged perpetrators is all important. The prosecution in both cases has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused politicians not only did whatever they are accused of, but that it was their intention to do so knowing that it was wrong. In civil matters the standard of proof is much lower; it is on the balance of probabilities!
Why am I raising this now? Because I was thinking about Dr. Rowley and his "emailgate" scandal. Dr. Rowley said in Parliament that the report he was making resulted from somebody unknown to him leaving the so-called evidence in his mailbox. Now, nobody really believes that Dr. Rowley doesn't know who the author of that now discredited report is. Indeed, the evidence on a balance of probabilities points to one particular person who is known to Dr. Rowley and because he (Rowley) knew the author, he was happy to believe that the allegations were true. But there is no evidence beyond reasonable doubt that this person gave Dr. Rowley the information.
In other words, although a reasonable person on the balance of probabilities might conclude that Dr. Rowley really did know who the author of that report was, the evidence beyond reasonable doubt that Dr. Rowley knew him simply does not exist. Put another way, there is no evidence beyond reasonable doubt that Dr. Rowley knew that the accusation that the former Prime Minister and some of her senior Ministers had conspired to commit murder was false and that in the circumstances, it can only be that while there is no justiciable evidence that Dr. Rowley, knowing the report to be untrue, deliberately misled the Parliament, there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that at the very least he knew where the information was coming from and that it was probably unreliable. But circumstantial evidence just ain't good enough so Dr. Rowley gets a free pass!
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