Friday - January 07, 2011

OBIT …. SIR JOHN OWEN … WHO FRIGHTENED OFF 8 WHITE CLAD VIRGINS … YEAH, REALLY.

Sir John Owen RIP

Sir John Owen, who has died aged 85, was a much admired High Court judge and presided at a number of ground-breaking cases.
Charming, even-handed and compassionate, he was also an exponent of Lord Denning’s judicial approach of not allowing the letter of the law to get in the way of justice.

A case in point was RvR (1991), in which Owen was the trial judge and which overturned the common law position that a man could not be found guilty of raping his wife.
The defendant was accused of attempting to rape his estranged wife after forcing his way into her parents’ house, where she had gone to live while seeking a divorce. He pleaded guilty after Owen’s unprecedented ruling that by the circumstances of their separation the wife had withdrawn her implied consent to sexual intercourse given upon marriage.

Owen’s decision was later upheld in the Court of Appeal by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, who declared that this “common law fiction” had become “anachronistic and offensive” in modern society, and also by the House of Lords, where Lord Keith said that marriage was no longer “one in which the wife must be the subservient chattel of the husband”.

John Arthur Dalziel Owen was born on November 22 1925 at Stockport, then part of Cheshire. He had a religious upbringing and his Christian faith underpinned his approach to life and the law.

After Solihull School, he was commissioned in the 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Gurkha Rifles, and spent two years in India in the run-up to independence, which he came to see as not just inevitable but also desirable.

On one occasion he saved his men from an angry mob by showing a presence of mind well in advance of his 21 years. Encountering a roadblock consisting of eight young virgins, dressed in white and lying in the path of his armoured vehicles, he ordered a good-looking young Gurkha to walk forward and drop his trousers.

The virgins ran off screaming and the column moved on without a shot being fired.

A kind and generous character with a lively sense of humour, Owen was an accomplished raconteur and much sought after to give speeches. In retirement, he worked hard for a number of charitable organisations.

John Owen, who died on December 9, is survived by his wife and by their son and daughter.

OBIT IN FULL IS HERE

Posted by peiper     on 01/07/2011 at 11:37 AM   
Filed Under: • OBITITUARIES •  
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