Mater Peat Worrier is no devotee of Monty Python, but I chortled at her reaction to recent press reports covering Tommy Sheridan's still-to-be-lodged appeal against conviction, potential "new witnesses" who have suddenly appeared in support of that appeal, today's Herald piece on contradictions in the evidence one of them and the news that Sheridan is plotting still further legal action against his old foes the News of the World and the Metropolitan Polis. You'd think that extended exposure to our courts might have slaked Mr Sheridan's thirst for litigation, not least with the imminent prospect of a return to the Court of Session to mount one last Quixotic defence of the paper's appeal against the civil jury's verdict in the defamation action of 2006 and the grim prospect of Lord Bracadale's penal tones as he consigns Sheridan to a jail cell for an as yet indeterminate period. Apparently not. Like Monty Python's Black Knight, Sheridan's constant refrain is "it's just a flesh wound!"
In another related piece, James Doleman, author of the Sheridan Trial blog, has composed a fascinating piece for the Gurnian entitled "Blogging from court: helping justice to be seen to be done". James meditates on his - quite novel - experience of using a blog to cover, often much more extensively than the popular press, what transpired in the High Court in Glasgow. Like many novelties, one gets the sense that the experience was challenging for James and challenged the settled human architecture of the courtroom, most strikingly by subverting - by his very presence - the orthodoxy that the press are the simple proxy for and medium through which public interest in a case must be communicated.
