The lady who wanted to sparkle – follow up

You have probably heard that C, the lady I wrote about on Wednesday, where a Judge had decided that she had capacity to make her own decision to refuse treatment, that decision being in keeping with her unusual approach to life rather than being a sign that she lacked capacity to make the rational decision that almost all of us would have made, died this week.

The Press made an application to be able to name her.  That’s a very tricky one.  On the one hand there is transparency and this case has certainly attracted a lot of media interest (and frankly given the biographical details in the story, I’m sure that the Daily Mail with their resources can find out who C was in about 30 minutes of investigation).  I don’t think this is prurient, I think there is some genuine public interest in the story and the issues, and of course a piece in a paper works far better when it is a real person not the letter C.

On the other, this case threw up very personal details in order to uphold C’s right enshrined in the Mental Capacity Act 2005 that everyone is assumed to have capacity unless proved otherwise and thus to refuse treatment unless proved they lack capacity – C did not bring the case to Court, she was brought into Court by the Trust and she won the case. So why should she be named when she did nothing whatsoever wrong in law? There are also the children to think of, one of whom is 15.

The final decision is not made yet, but an interim Reporting Restriction Order was made, preventing publication of the name until the matter can be properly litigated.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCOP/2015/83.html

I read in the week, sadly with bad timing on the day that I learned that C had died, the article in the Guardian by Zoe Williams. That article attacked the Judge and linked his decision with other very controversial outbursts by Judges – arguing that the Judge’s setting out of the history showed an inherent sexism.  I felt that the article was ill-concieved and had missed all of the real substance of the case.  I normally rate Zoe as a writer, so the tone of the piece, particularly the attack on C’s children surprised me.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/02/slur-woman-who-lost-sparkle-c-right-to-die-judgment-femininity-marriage

I then saw the piece by Lucy Series from The Small Places blog, that made me look at it in another way. I think this is the best piece of writing on C’s case and the issues that it throws up of ‘who are judgments written for in a transparency climate?’  and ‘should they be written in the same way as they used to be’?

https://thesmallplaces.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/the-stories-we-tell/

I wish I could write like Lucy does. I dash stuff off the way that Kerouac wrote “On the Road”  – typing furiously, getting all of my thoughts on the page  – Kerouac wrote so fast that he taped paper into one giant sheet to save him the distraction of having to stop and put a fresh sheet into the Hermes  (and I’m reminded that Truman Capote famously said of his method “That’s not writing, that’s typing”).  Lucy is much more the Truman Capote style of constructing the piece, making the words all do their share of the work, not having a sentence in that doesn’t say something important and say it in just the right way, and it being more like inspecting a gorgeous diamond from a variety of angles rather than listening to someone excitedly blurt out what’s on their mind.   Hopefully, there’s a place for both Kerouac and Capote in legal blogging.