Today, the government has confirmed that it intends to remove the right to trial by jury in the vast majority of cases in the Crown Courts. Serious criminal allegations, carrying up to three years in prison, will, under David Lammy’s proposals, no longer be tried by juries, returning verdicts based on their assessments of the…
Read moreWe need to talk about the Sentencing Council
The past few weeks have seen significant political and media attention lavished on the Sentencing Council of England and Wales, a small independent non-departmental public body which has hitherto attracted little interest from anybody outside the criminal justice system. What began as a sprinkling of misinformation on social media has snowballed into a political and…
Read moreTwo tier justice? Cutting through the online myths is
Much has been written, tweeted and amplified about the English and Welsh criminal justice system’s response to the recent incidents of public disorder, very little of which is accurate. Below is a quick primer on the truth behind some of the more popular and virulent myths. “People are being charged and brought before the courts…
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Is it fair to criticise Keir Starmer for representing terrorists? Ten things you should know.
Following a series of attacks by the government and parts of the media against the leader of the opposition based on his career as a barrister, it appears necessary to sprinkle some facts into the conversation. 1. Keir Starmer was a barrister. What is a barrister? A nice easy one to kick off. A barrister is…
Read moreHere’s what’s wrong with Labour’s attack ads on crime
Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry this morning became the latest media casualty of Labour’s attempts to justify their much-criticised attack adverts on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in particular the tweet claiming that Mr Sunak “[doesn’t] believe that adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison”. Appearing on Radio 4’s Today programme to be interviewed…
Read moreHow do we force cowardly murderers to face up to what they have done?
Something must be done about the problem of convicted criminals refusing to attend court for their sentencing hearings. So both main political parties are agreed. And so, according to polls, is the public. The issue has returned to the fore this week with the refusal of Thomas Cashman to attend his sentence following his conviction…
Read moreThe law’s broken. Here’s how to fix it.
As has been widely reported, in light of Justice Secretary Dominic Raab’s refusal to implement the urgent recommendations of the government-commissioned Independent Review of Criminal Legal Aid, criminal barristers have voted in record numbers in favour of an unprecedented indefinite walkout. Barristers defending in legally aided criminal cases will no longer be attending Crown Courts,…
Read moreThe Criminal Bar on strike – 9 things you need to know
Today, hundreds of criminal barristers across the country will not be going into court. Images of us dressed in our traditional absurd courtroom dress and standing outside the country’s most famous court buildings will be plastered across the papers and piped into the nation’s tellyboxes. There has already been – and no doubt will continue…
Read moreWhy are criminal barristers taking part in an “unnecessary and irresponsible strike”?
According to Justice Secretary Dominic Raab, today I, along with thousands of my fellow criminal barristers, am taking part in an “unnecessary and irresponsible strike” which will “cause delays for victims and the wider public”. This comes as something of a surprise to me. It’s an odd sort of “strike”, given that we will, today…
Read moreWhy on earth would the Metropolitan Police ask Sue Gray to redact key parts of her independent report?
This has been the question reverberating around Twitter all day. It’s the first question I asked myself when I saw the story, and was a question that appeared several hundred times in my mentions from people understandably confused by the Met’s curious statement, released this morning: “For the events the Met is investigating, we asked…
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