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I have been following a judicial case which has been given meagre coverage in the MSM but has been subject to an incredible amount of indignant BTL reaction for reasons which will become clear. The case is local to me, hence my profound interest. I am posting the information here simply to make readers aware of another travesty in the UK’s legal system which demonstrates the depths to which our once solid justice system has fallen.
I shall try to summarise the circumstances and proceedings which have caused an outcry.
A, by all accounts, respectable 17 year old (aspiring to be a heart surgeon), Yousef Makki, of Anglo-Lebanese parentage and from a not particularly affluent area of Manchester was stabbed to death in an affluent area of Manchester with a single puncture wound to the heart in March this year. He was with two friends at the time, one of whom called the police. When questioned by the police, the latter changed his story about what happened several times and was eventually charged with murder. The charged boy, also 17 and of Anglo-Hungarian parentage, came from the affluent area in which the incident occurred. His parents are separated, his father is a management consultant and his mother owns a chain of pre-school nurseries which enables her to send the charged boy to a school costing £33k per year.
At the four day court case, the defence lawyers claimed that the victim had drawn a knife on the defendant during an argument and the defendant had stabbed him in self-defence with a knife he was carrying. The third boy present also had a knife on him. But the third boy, the only potential witness, gave no evidence at all on the grounds that he ‘didn’t see the lead up to the incident or the incident itself’ despite being at the scene. Neither the defence nor prosecution lawyers were able to question him. Apparently three knives were picked up by police at the scene but it must be said that there was no forensic evidence found directly linking the victim to any of the knives.
The defendant’s reputation was known to defence and prosecution lawyers. He had a known unhealthy obsession with gang and knife culture, regularly posting videos of himself on Snapchat using street language and brandishing knives in an aggressive manner. He had been arrested two weeks prior to the death of Yousef for carrying a machete in the street and suggesting he intended to rob people with it. The police kept him in overnight but released him the next day without charge. Presumably this information was not allowed to be revealed during the hearing. He had attended several different schools while living in the same area and had been “asked to leave” even at primary school age, his mother being quick to refute that he had been ‘expelled’.
Conversely, Yousef had been an exemplary grammar school student and teenager with no suggestion that he had any interest in knives or gang culture.
During the court proceedings the Makki family were prohibited from the court room for fear their presence might intimidate the defendant. The defendant’s family were allowed in court. It isn’t clear who demanded this exclusion but there was no suggestion of threatened malpractice on the part of the Makki family. They were made to sit in an outer area where headphones should have been provided…but there weren’t sufficient numbers of headphones to allow any of them to have a set, so they had no idea what was being said in court until after the judge summed up and delivered the sentence. They were told the final verdict but no one from the Court came to see them in an official capacity to offer any explanation for that outcome or to show any acknowledgement of the loss of their son.
The verdict and sentence? Not guilty of murder or manslaughter. Guilty of possessing a knife, and perjury. The third boy was found guilty of possessing a knife. The principal defendant was sentenced to 6 months in a juvenile detention centre.
A couple of days after the court case finished, a video was posted by the defendant on Snapchat showing him brandishing a knife whilst in detention in the Court and making stabbing actions with it. The video was sent to the Makki family by a mutual acquaintance who thought they ought to see it as they were proceeding with an appeal against the defendant’s sentence. When the police saw it they said it wasn’t relevant to the appeal. The defendant’s mother said he was simply acting in frustration at the way he was being presented in court [as a knife loving psycho, presumably!].
I have also seen a screenshot (since deleted) of a Facebook post written a couple of days after the arrest in which a mutual friend of the victim and defendant states that the two boys had a verbal argument and the defendant drew a knife at which Yousef said, as boys might do, “Are you planning to stab me? Well go on then.” And the defendant did, a single puncture wound through the heart. It would be interesting to know where this information came from, being that the only other person present officially claimed not to have witnessed anything.
My own view, and that of hundreds of other people, is that the entire proceedings have demonstrated an inordinate weighting throughout in favour of the defendant, despite clear evidence that he lied to the police about what happened leading to the ‘guilty of perjury’ verdict, and disregard for the victim and his family. At the very least and based on even the case presented by the defence counsel, why was the verdict not manslaughter? The defendant freely admitted that he stabbed Yousef. Whilst I myself wouldn’t go so far as to suggest it, some BTL commentators have questioned whether ‘money talks’.
I understand that the Makki family, their first appeal having been thrown out, are now considering taking out a civil action against the defendant.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/06/teenager-stabbed-friend-death-named-joshua-molnarFor the sake of accuracy I should just correct a couple of points in my account above. First the defendant was found guilty of “perverting the course of justice” rather than perjury and, second, when he filmed himself in the court building making stabbing actions he was acting out the scenario rather than having an actual knife in his hand.
