‘Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.’ So said Boris Johnson, in announcing his departure from parliament, with reference to the Commons Privileges Committee. What have kangaroos got to do with it?
Perhaps a kangaroo court’s essence is not in fact that of finding the accused guilty. That is the work of a show trial: ‘A judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, and typically having a predetermined verdict,’ as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it.
A kangaroo court is more like lynch law, named after Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace active in 1780 during a threatened Loyalist uprising in Virginia, when suspects were given summary trials. Lynching developed its own horrible connotations for black Americans in the century after the Civil War.
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