Criticism
Although Mahmood has helped to expose crime, his methods have often been criticised. In addition to Greenslade's campaign, politician George Galloway has also sought to challenge him, while some lawyers have complained that Mahmood has sometimes broken the law without clear public interest justification.
In 1999, after a Mahmood investigation exposed the Earl of Hardwicke and another man as drug dealers, the jury sent a note to the judge explaining that they had reached their decision to convict the two men with great reluctance. They said that they would have acquitted the defendants if the law had enabled them to take into account Mahmood's "extreme provocation" of them to sell him cocaine. The judge agreed and passed suspended sentences.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)