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

by The Secret Barrister

In fairness, we have seen slight improvements since 1995, a time when JPs were recruited sans interview by a tap on the shoulder from an old chum. But the unsurprising legacy of an institution which, until 1906, jealously restricted membership to the landed gentry, and until the 1990s was still dominated by freemasons,13 is that today with your average bench, you’re not entrusting your liberty to the collective wisdom of twelve everymen; the butcher, baker, candle-stick emporium televangelist etc. You’re often pitching to the admissions board of a 1980s country club.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve locked eyes with a legal advisor and watched their eyebrows ascend to the heavens as a magistrate reads out a decision wildly ignoring the legal advice patiently explained to them just moments before.

The answer, I fear, is because 800 years ago the state wanted low-level trouble and strife dealt with quickly and cheaply. It mattered not at that time, when individual rights and the presumption of innocence were half a millennium away from public consciousness, whether justice was being administered fairly, so long as it was being administered. In the twenty-first century, when no government worth its political salt will voluntarily pledge expenditure on something as headline-unworthy as the lowest criminal courts, the same attitude persists. It’s just the underclasses who are affected. Except, of course, it isn’t. It’s anyone who is accused of a criminal offence. Anyone who witnesses an offence. Anyone who is a victim. And anyone who values liberty.

The judge is forced to imagine how unappealing your client is, rather than have the proof of the pudding shouting racial epithets from the back of court.

And if the state is unwilling to contemplate the notion of apology or compensation, arrogant in the assumption that those hit hardest are those for whom public sympathy will never register on opinion polls, it should at the very least ensure that the procedure by which bail decisions should be made is properly respected.

But the number of trials listed as floaters in a single building, where it is clear that most of them have no hope of finding a home, is a victory for listing statistics over basic human decency.

If you were a criminal mastermind trying to design a system to deter victims of crime from engaging with the authorities, you would struggle to devise something better.

really have to advise, I said, in the strongest terms, that we knock this on the head. His barked reply disclosed the root of our stalemate: ‘What about our statistics?’

And so we found ourselves in the judge’s chambers at an impasse, no one at court, least of all the victim, thinking that a trial was a sensible idea, but our hands tied by an office-bound civil servant craven to his statistics. The judge’s expletive-filled reaction when I mentioned that the word ‘statistics’ had arisen in my discussions with the CPS was most unjudicial, but entirely apt.

The judge’s solution to our impasse was ingenious. He directed that the CPS District Prosecutor attend court to explain his decision in person. Sure enough, no sooner had those words left my lips and whizzed down the receiver did the curt reply spring forth: ‘Look, just offer no evidence. Goodbye.’ After months of head-thumping wrangling, sensible instructions were finally forthcoming. But it took the threat of having to leave the snug confines of his office, enter the den of the criminal courts and publicly justify his decision, to make that jobsworth apply his mind to the genuine interests of the victims and the public. This is far from an exceptional tale. And, I would come to learn, far from an exceptional course taken by the judge.