Crime brief: 24 March 2023

• Law and politics.
• Transgender women in the prison estate.
• Society’s changing mores.

The borderlands between law and politics are endlessly fought over. The front lines are constantly shifting. Similar dilemmas can have very different outcomes, depending on whether battle is joined in a court of law, or in the rather more fickle court of public opinion.

This phenomenon is strikingly illustrated by the controversy which, in the view of many, elevated some embarrassing polling data into a full-scale resignation issue for the first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. If nothing else, it seems to prove that in politics, as in life, timing is everything. Having found herself on arguably the wrong side of the debate about the incarceration of transgender women in women’s prisons, the hitherto untouchable leader of the Scottish National Party would doubtless look with a quizzical eye on the recent decision of the Administrative Court in Prusianu v