Constance Briscoe, 57, barrister and part-time judge who lied to police during Chris Huhne’s speeding points investigation, is removed from the judiciary

Posted on August 9, 2014 by Mike Buchanan

Good. Constance Briscoe, 57, a barrister and part-time judge, is currently serving a 16-month jail sentence for trying to pervert the course of justice over the investigation into how disgraced former MP Chris Huhne passed speeding points to his then-wife Vicky Pryce a decade earlier. An extract from the article:

The 57-year-old, who was one of the first black women to sit as a judge in the UK, was jailed for twice the amount of time handed to Huhne and Pryce, after it emerged that she had helped economist Pryce, a friend and also her neighbour, to reveal information about Huhne’s points-swapping to newspapers after the couple split in 2010.

The court heard that Briscoe was intent on bringing about Mr Huhne’s downfall [our emphasis] and knew how to manipulate the criminal justice system to her advantage, misleading police in her witness statements and deliberately giving them an altered copy of one of her statements.

Briscoe and Pryce were friends and neighbours. This case is an interesting example of female in-group preferencing, which typically goes on ‘under the radar’ and so isn’t normally detected. Lady Hale, the only female judge in the Supreme Court, regularly says we ‘need’ more female judges. Ha.

About Mike Buchanan

I'm a men's human rights advocate, writer, and publisher. My primary focus is leading the political party I launched in 2013, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). I still work actively on two campaigns I launched in early 2012, Campaign for Merit in Business and the Anti-Feminism League. In 2014 I launched The Alternative Sexism Project, aiming to raise public understanding that the sexism faced by men and boys has far more grievous consequences than the sexism faced by women and girls.
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  • It is fashionable for Judges to be criticised for being out of touch and ( ironically actually ageist) too old. Well I like having a pop at judges like anyone else but I can’t help thinking that the sort of fast tracking and sleight of hand to meet informal “quotas” has a role on this case. It seems Constance Briscoe had no personal integrity to so abuse her office and power. It’s not afterall her speeding ticket. . No she deliberately misled and perverted the very system she actually swore an oath to uphold. This case like that of “plebgate” appears to be evidence that there is a cancer in our institutions as political”assassinations” are conived at. The sort of campaigns that one can expect coming from partisan newspapers now being conducted from “within” institutions. It’s actually deeply concerning for democracy when this happens. Mr. Gove’s fall looks like politics as “Dave” gives in to publicly mounted opposition, not pretty but democracy as we practice it. But this case and “plebgate” were clearly polically motivated attacks from within the institutions sworn to uphold the rule of law. One wonders how many others have been fast tracked and gained an inflated sense of their own right to use their position for their own ends , and what if as in plebgate they find co-conspirators?

  • You cannot judge all female judges on the errant behaviour of just one. In a representative democracy we DO need more female judges.

    • Utter rubbish. Why do we ‘need’ more female judges when the judiciary is already far more lenient towards female criminals than male criminals? We don’t. The idea that we do is simply a way to promote more female lawyers beyond their competence, it is blatantly anti-meritocratic, as every such ‘need’ for more women is. The reason there are more men than women at the top of the judiciary and elsewhere is explained by Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory (2000). We no more ‘need’ more female judges than we ‘need’ more white sprinters in the Olympics 100 metres final.

  • You’re assuming that a female judge would be more lenient than a male judge. I suspect that most judges are gallant old men who have difficulty passing harsh sentences on women and tend to favour them in divorce cases.

    When I was fighting to gain access to my son following divorce, the best judge I had was a woman: when my wife started grizzling, the female judge got annoyed with her, whereas male judges tended to sympathise.

    Female judges are strong successful women and I suspect that most will not be giving “pussy passes” to pathetic women who want to bleed their exes dry or not face the consequences of their own actions.

    I agree with you that men and women do tend to make different life-style and career choices and this can explain much of the imbalance in the workplace. For example, I couldn’t care less if there aren’t many women in engineering because they’re over-represented elsewhere doing something else that they’ve chosen to do. I only disagree with you on positions affecting the way we’re governed (parliament and the judiciary).

    If women are so different to men that they naturally, without any discrimination, make up only a small percentage of MPs and judges, then this proves that women are really quite a lot different to men and we should expect that their life-experiences would be very different too. Such significant differences makes women their own constituency which is entitled to proportional representation.

    • You make an interesting point about female judges, but I doubt ‘strong successful women’ need to be preferenced to become judges. My hunch is there are many senior lawyers who simply don’t want the lives of judges, just as few female teachers want the responsibility of being headmistresses. Work/life balance and all that. As far as politicians are concerned, male politicians are already pro-female and anti-male, while many female politicians (especially Labour and Lib Dem ones) are even more so. MPs are paid to represent their constituents, not to favour one segment of society (women in this case) over another (men).