The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

by The Secret Barrister

I have flown too close to the sun on wings forged of a misplaced confidence in my plainly meagre ability.

To commit a crime is to break a law that offends not just those directly affected, but strikes at the heart of our communal values so deeply that we agree that organized, coercive action is required to

Crimes are marked as the gravest breaches of our social codes which, unlike civil wrongs such as breach of contract, the state cannot leave to individuals to privately arbitrate.

Crimes are the legal disputes that evoke primeval, visceral reactions in people with no stake in the fight, intruding through screens and leaping off pages and into our core identity, pinching and testing the standards by which we define ourselves.

At this point it is brought home, vividly and viscerally, what criminal justice means in practice; not abstract concepts in dusty textbooks, but a suffusion of humanity – tears, blood, anger, loss, redemption and despair. ‘

That defendants, victims and, ultimately, society are being failed daily by an entrenched disregard for fundamental principles of fairness. That we are moving from a criminal justice system to simply a criminal system.

Ours is the trade in human misery; the grotty little cousin of the finer, more civilized, more commercial tributaries of the law.

when people feel that justice is denied that they are at their most indignant and rage-filled; it is in the gaps between justice that antidemocratic, subversive urges can take root.

A period of custody in one of Her Majesty’s prisons is the most severe sentence the court can pass. Yet, the idea of deprivation of liberty as punishment is relatively modern. Anglo-Saxon

if you want to know the law on a given topic, the statute alone only tells you half the story; you will need to know what gloss has been slapped over it by court precedents.8