Yet another 'innocent' criminal

Knitting needles will be clacking in every small town following a cry for help from Jules Mikus, our latest innocent man.

This country's grannies seem especially prone to believing in the innocence of any criminal who tells a sad story with a serious face, and to knitting them jumpers. And there's something about Mikus, maybe just his bad spelling, which surely reeks of innocence and a set-up by the cops. He must need a woolly scarf – several hundred of them – out there in Wanganui jail, where the winds blow cold from the Antarctic.

You'd think old ladies would be the first to back the police, but such is not the case. The sweeter their dear little faces, the snowier their locks and fuller their cake tins, the more they seem to be suckers for a bad guy with a good story.

Mikus, who made his newest declaration of innocence this week, will have them all a-twitter, and by now several eager lawyers should have risen to the bait, since he said he couldn't find one to act for him.

Within a fortnight, some dopey woman will likely have married him.

Something I don't understand: why is it only the nastiest crimes that attract this much attention? How come no boring wife-beater is the victim of a police conspiracy?

Why does it have to be a Scott Watson, a John Barlow, a David Bain, a Mikus? Don't the police have to practise, sometimes, on less fascinating crimes, just to get their hand in? So how come they're never caught on these practice runs?

In another illustration of our pecularities, a Family Court judge last week condemned a Northland couple who hid a kidnapped Hamilton boy for their "absolute arrogance".

Tania Thomason and Jeremy Daly hid Jayden Headley while he was on the run with his grandfather, breaching a Family Court order. The judge called it arrogance, but it's yet another instance of that strange element in our society, an element sceptical and credulous in equal parts, which will leap into action for the most dubious of reasons just so long as it's against authority.

The Headley case echoes Liam Williams-Holloway, the boy whose parents hid him from cancer treatment, and found a network of supporters who ensured they got away with it till it was too late to treat him, and he died. People don't just distrust the police; they also don't trust the medical profession.

The more complicated and certain forensic evidence gets, the more they doubt it, and believe what criminals say. The more medical science advances, the more they'd prefer to trust in astrology. And as for the courts, they regard them as irrelevant.

Thomason and Daly were shocked to be sent straight to jail, which in itself suggested their loose grip on reality. Kidnapping is a serious crime. Thomason was left shouting for their small children, one of whom she was still breastfeeding, a thought that's painful to contemplate.

But it didn't occur to either of them, as they fretted, that Jayden's father might have had powerful feelings about his young son being hidden in God-knows-what circumstances for months.

It's not even as if they'd heard both sides of the story before they got involved.

Apparently they neither read papers, nor listened to the news, and lived in ignorance of the significance of what they had done. All the more reason, you'd have thought, not to get involved in the first place.

On a less perplexing note, what intriguing news that was of Australia's Opposition leader Kevin Rudd doing a Sir Les Patterson in New York.

The clean-cut Labor leader toddled, "too drunk to remember much", into a strip club during an official 2003 visit to the United Nations, in the company of a Labor backbencher and a New York newspaper editor. It was the second time in his life he'd been to a strip club, he's admitted. The first was when he was a student.

I'm confused about the etiquette of these things. Helen Clark turned her nose up at the idea of strip clubs, as this story unfolded, but I recall Labour MP Marian Hobbs extolling the virtues of a sex toy manufacturing business in Wellington just three years ago.

"These people provide a good service to those who enjoy the product," Ms Hobbs declared, as she wafted past the fur handcuffs. As is the case, no doubt, with strip clubs.

But such is our national peculiarity that whatever men enjoy must surely be condemned, as fast as whatever middle-aged women enjoy becomes compulsory.

- © Fairfax NZ News