Law

I have been a defence lawyer for more than 25 years. I have defended clients charged with almost every crime there is. I have argued against convictions for robbery, rape, sexual assault, murder, manslaughter, copyright theft, perverting the course of justice, perjury, serious fraud, international illegal fishing, money laundering, causing death by dangerous driving, grievous bodily harm, blackmail… and the list goes on. Of all the crimes and misdemeanours I have seen, all the improbable tales and shocking lies in the witness box, what sticks with me most about the criminal justice system is the utter simplicity of the one thing that lies behind almost all of it. People want to take drugs and nothing will stop them.

Speaking on the radio this morning, the Foreign Secretary refused the temptation to condemn the Legal Aid Authority's grant of legal aid to Shamima Begum. He was right to do so. We give legal aid to those accused of murder and genocide. This is not because we have sympathy with murderers and genocidal killers but because it is overwhelmingly in the public interest that criminal trials are fair, and that people are punished only when their guilt has been fairly established in accordance with the law. Once a crime passes a certain level of seriousness, legal aid for those without the means to pay is automatic. It would be absurd if it were denied to those accused of the most serious offences, or against whom there was particularly strong evidence.

This week we reached a new level of chaos in British politics. With parliament voting down all indicatives vote options, as well as May’s deal for the third time, the Prime Minister was running out of moves. So that's how we find ourselves here: with a Prime Minister reaching out to Jeremy Corbyn. James Forsyth writes in this week’s cover article that the Iraq War, the financial crash, and the expenses scandal may have damaged the public’s faith in their politicians, but the impact of a failure to deliver Brexit will be even worse. The entire process has created an impression of a self-serving enclave of politicians who are interested only in ideological purity – not the interests of the people.

It is late, on a wet Tuesday evening in November, and I am driving home, listening to endless talk of Brexit on the radio. The phone rings in the car and cuts off the news. It’s an unknown mobile number; I press the answer button on the steering wheel. A moment’s hesitation and a woman’s voice comes over the speakers; middle-aged, well-spoken. She’s almost in tears and struggles to get her words out. ‘You don’t know me, and I’m so sorry to ring you this late. I got your number from my lawyer friend Stuart, and he told me you are the person I need to call. It’s about my son. He’s in a police station now. He’s been arrested for rape.’ I have been a criminal barrister for more than 25 years and a QC since 2013.

The greatest criminal barrister of all time, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, who probably saved more men and women from the gallows than anyone in English history, was famous for his 'scales of justice' speech, in which, as described in Sally Smith's magnificent biography, he would stand for several long minutes with his arms outstretched at shoulder height and say: ‘It may appear that the scales of justice are first weighed on one side in favour of the prisoner and then on the other against the prisoner. As counsel on either side puts the evidence in the scales, I can call to my fancy a great statue of Justice holding the two scales with equally honest hands.

Between 2010 and 2015 the Ministry of Justice endured amongst the deepest cuts of any government department. Yet even as over £2 billion was saved by closing courts, cutting legal aid and allowing prisons to become dangerous, rat-infested, spice-ridden hell-holes, the Ministry of Justice was powering ahead with a £1 billion plan to 'digitise' the court system. Unlike the cockroaches crawling along the prison landings it sounded slick and modern, and to some extent it was successful. Most criminal case 'papers' are now accessible electronically, a considerable convenience to all concerned, though advocates usually prefer – at their own expense - to print out hard copies for use in court.

Hard cases make bad law. The release on parole of the ‘black cab rapist’, John Worboys, is a hard case. But ministers should not be panicked into throwing open parole board decision--making to public inspection. The police have blundered, the sentence was surely too lenient, and the failure to inform his victims was disgraceful. But it was not upon some careless whim that Parliament barred parole boards from giving reasons, and the new Justice Secretary, David Gauke, should think hard before reversing the interdiction. Much of the furore provoked by the release of this serial attacker of women after ten years in prison really arises not from the parole board’s decision but the original sentence and the flawed prosecution process which helped produce it.

How good a businessman is Donald Trump? Maybe the answer doesn’t matter, since barring death or impeachment he’ll be the most powerful man in the world until January 2021, or even 2025, come what may. Or maybe it does matter, in the sense that the only positive spin to be put on his otherwise ridiculous presidency is that the irrepressible cunning of the real-estate tycoon will eventually win through for the good of America — and thereby, we must hope, the good of the free world — against opponents who have smaller cojones and less dealmaking prowess than the Donald does. ‘He’s the closer,’ declared White House spokesman Sean Spicer, shortly before his boss failed to close his biggest political deal so far, the American Health Care Act.