The Secret Barrister Quotes

“it is outrageous that the law appears deliberately incomprehensible to those who need to understand it most.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.’ William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“You may well know a lawyer, or of a friend of a friend who’s a lawyer, who is fabulously well off. If so, I offer you an iron-clad guarantee that they are not a criminal lawyer.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled. Nor will we proceed with force against him except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“When we ask what sort of society we want, can we tolerate imposing the ultimate coercive sanction – permanent deprivation of liberty – upon people who we agree may reasonably be entirely blameless?”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“We weren’t sure whether to believe the defendant or the complainant. We find the defendant guilty.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“despite the grand principles at its heart, at nearly every stage of our prized system of criminal justice we see things going badly, and preventably, wrong.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“what system would I want as the falsely accused? Knowing what I already know after only a few years exposed to the grimy coalface of the criminal justice system, would I have faith in an inquisitorial jurisdiction where the state, with its variable competence and political vulnerability, controlled my fate throughout? Or would I trust the presentation of my case to an independent solicitor and advocate, and hope that twelve ordinary people, shown evidence that is relevant, reliable and fairly adduced, would find the prosecution insufficient to convict me? Every time the answer is the same.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“If in so doing, I help to secure the acquittal of someone who is in fact guilty, or the conviction of someone who may be innocent, that is frankly not my professional concern. The jury had the evidence, fairly and lawfully presented and scrutinized. It was for those twelve neutrals, not me, to decide whether the state had made them sure of guilt.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“For all that work, the solicitor will be paid a single fixed ‘police station attendance’ fee of roughly £170. If that sounds a low gross figure for what might amount to twenty hours’ work, it’s because it is.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“We don’t want to think about being a witness to our husband’s stabbing. Or supporting our wife through her rapist’s trial. Or receiving the phone call reporting that our straight-A son’s exam celebrations got a bit lairy and ended in him taking his mate’s dad’s Jag out for a spin, wrapping it round a lamp post and killing his three passengers. Or our grandfather being accused of sexually abusing young boys as a Scout leader in the 1950s. Such things don’t happen to people like us. The criminal courts are not the place for people like us. Legal aid isn’t something that is ever going to affect people like us.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“if the evidence has been gathered and not lost, if the witnesses have attended, if the interpreter is present, if the defendant has been produced from custody, if the court can actually accommodate a trial – the hard part, surely, is over?”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“We can either keep rising numbers of prisoners in humane prisons that serve a purpose beyond warehousing, for which the Exchequer – ultimately you, the taxpayer – must pay through higher taxation; or we can shift paradigms and explore evidence-based policy from abroad that would see the use of prison radically reduced, and non-custodial, restorative and rehabilitative alternatives envisaged not as a ‘get-out’ but as meaningful components of a working justice system.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“what, for me, the notion of justice is about. And that is fairness. To me, fairness is rooted intractably within what we mean when we talk about criminal justice. Fairness to the defendant. Fairness to the victim. Fairness to the witnesses. And fairness to the public. When we cry that an outcome or a procedure is unjust, we tend to mean that it’s not fair.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“The underlying principles, accidental and incoherent though their evolution may have been, have been exported around the globe for good reason: the presumption of innocence and burden of proof, the right to a fair trial, the right to independent legal representation, equality of arms, an independent judiciary, non-partisan tribunals of fact and the other fiercely debated, non-exhaustive aspects of the rule of law on which our present settlement is premised, all stand as self-evidently necessary to our instinctual conceptions of justice.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“The state is told that, where the conviction it has secured against one of us is so undermined that no conviction could possibly be based upon it, it need not say sorry.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“Our system operates so that unless you can prove to the highest legal standard that you are innocent, no miscarriage of justice will be acknowledged. It creates a legal fiction as to what constitutes a ‘miscarriage of justice’, entirely at odds with our common understanding of the term.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“In February 2017, inspectors concluded that ‘there was not a single establishment that we inspected in England and Wales in which it was safe to hold children and young people’.46 Prison deaths are at record levels: 354 prisoners died in custody in 2016. Of these, 119 were suicides.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“The Law Commission, the independent statutory body charged with researching and publishing recommendations for potential law reforms, put it succinctly in 2015: ‘For a lay person to discover the law would be practically impossible.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“There are a range of sentences each with their own qualifying criteria, from discharges and fines through community orders to custodial sentences, both immediate and suspended. There are mandatory life sentences, automatic life sentences (not the same thing), discretionary life sentences, extended sentences of imprisonment (various iterations of which each carry their own special complex provisions about prisoner release dates), special sentences for ‘offenders of particular concern’, hospital orders (with or without restrictions) and mandatory minimum custodial sentences, to name a few.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“To try to make sense of sentencing is to roam directionless in the expansive dumping ground of the criminal law.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“An Israeli study of parole board decisions in 2011 showed that a prisoner’s chances of release receded to near zero as the clock ticked towards lunchtime, immediately after which the likelihood soared.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“A working paper by two economists studying juvenile court sentences in Louisiana between 1996 and 2012 reported robust findings that longer sentences were imposed by alumni of Louisiana State University following unexpected defeats for the Tigers, the LSU football team.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“For me, the lesson of history is that the state alone cannot be trusted to find the truth.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“Stage one of the investigative process – has a crime been committed? – is rendered redundant. Whereas for the children of Rochdale or Savile, the default conclusion of the police was always ‘No’, the equally unsatisfactory default under this model is ‘Yes’. The box is already ticked, no questions asked. Only if the police are satisfied of the opposite will it ever be unticked. I can do no better than directly quote Sir Richard: this policy ‘perverts our system of justice and attempts to impose upon a thinking investigator an artificial and false state of mind’.25 It ‘has and will generate miscarriages of justice on a considerable scale’.26”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“the graft and ingenuity of police officers who I will not hesitate to say rarely get the public recognition or gratitude that their sacrifices richly merit.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“Hanlon’s Razor holds that one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by neglect,”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“at the last estimate, there were roughly only twenty prosecutions of malicious rape complaints per year,4 while there are approximately 7,000 annual complaints of rape made to the police.5 Under-reporting of sexual offences is widely accepted to be numerically far more prevalent than malicious complaints.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

“It is of more importance . . . that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished . . . But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, “It is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.” And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject, that would be the end of all security whatsoever.”
― The Secret Barrister, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken