British justice now shambles.

Byline: Denise Robertson

WHAT a shambles British justice has become. I'll pass quickly over the Family Courts in case I'm overcome by apoplexy, and concentrate instead on the Crown Prosecution Service.

Someone in the CPS, no doubt well-qualified and highly paid, sanctioned the charging of a 12-year-old with grievous bodily harm for using an elastic band to flick a paper pellet at a classmate during an in-school bout of horseplay. The pellet caused a minor injury to the other boy's eye.

The case came to court twice before the CPS backed down and has cost us, the taxpayers, some pounds 10,000. The boy in question now allegedly suffers from stress-related epileptic fits and the mother is in danger of losing her job because of the time she has had to take off work.

The mother agrees that he should not have flicked the pellet, but GBH is the third most serious offence after murder and attempted murder. Was it ever envisioned that it should apply to horseplay among the sub-teens? Of course flicking pellets, even paper ones, is dangerous and not to be encouraged. But have we lost the ability to subdue naughty 12-year-olds without invoking the majesty of the law?

If we were pursuing a no-tolerance policy it might have been justifiable to prosecute the pellet flicker, but at the same time a boy of 14 who shot a schoolgirl in the face with an air rifle, nearly blinding her, has escaped punishment altogether on account of his youth. Is an air rifle not a weapon of grievous bodily harm? Why the difference in levels of tolerance?

Elsewhere a girl of 10 has been fingerprinted, threatened with an ASBO and fined pounds 40 for crayoning on a wall. What had she crayoned? The letter "S." She told the attending policemen she was sorry, but that didn't stop them coming to her home, fingerprinting her and issuing the fine. Now she is upset and crying at school, and who could blame her?

Even when justice is meted out it fails to have an effect. Michael Kuba-Kuba, then 16, beat a 51-year-old man into a coma because he tried to stop a gang vandalising cars. Sentenced to 12 months youth custody he was freed after serving five months and has since gone back to re-offending, receiving a community rehabilitation order for one offence and a fine of pounds 15 for another.

Justice in this country has become a joke.

Denise Robertson cannot enter into any personal correspondence.