In Your Defence Read online

  About the Book

  Sarah Langford is a barrister. Her job is to represent the mad and the bad, the broken and the hopeful. In court, she must tell their story, weaving it around the black and white of the law. These stories change the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary ways, but for a twist of luck, they might have been yours.

  In eleven heart-stopping cases, Sarah describes what goes on in our family and criminal courts. She reveals what it is like to work in a world of archaic rituals and inaccessible language. And she explores what it means to be at its mercy. Our legal system promises us justice and fair judgement. Does it, can it, deliver this?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  1 Dominic

  2 Derek

  3 Saba

  4 Raymond

  5 Rita

  6 Maggie

  7 Peter

  8 Daniel

  9 Helena

  10 Chris

  11 Jude

  Notes on the Law

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  IN YOUR DEFENCE

  Stories of Life and Law

  Sarah Langford

  To my two small sons, Wilfred and Aubrey.

  You brought me back to earth.

  Foreword

  THE LAW. A great and ancient institution filled with strange words and rituals, impenetrable to those outside it. A place where steel-hearted lawyers in costume dissect people’s lives in a quest for truth, with no understanding of, or place in, the modern world.

  That’s what I thought too.

  I am not most people’s idea of a stereotypical barrister. I am not a man, I did not go to a top university, nor do I come from a family of lawyers. I studied an English degree because I loved the way that words transported me into someone else’s life so that I could better understand them. And this, I later discovered, is exactly what barristers do too. For behind the clever arguments spun from the pages of a law book there is always a human tale. It is my job to help my clients fit their lives, in all their messy shades of grey, within the black and white of the law by telling their story, and telling it well.

  This book contains the stories of eleven people I represented in both the criminal and the family courts. All of their lives were changed by the law, for better or for worse, for ever. But often I was changed too. I began to wonder whether I was really so different from the people I represented, or whether, but for a twist of fate, their stories could have been mine.

  Although the evidence in every criminal case is a matter of public record, I have changed everybody’s names – from clients to witnesses to lawyers – as well as their physical description and the location of their case to ensure that no one is identifiable. Sometimes I have also changed their gender and racial origin and a distinguishing piece of evidence but otherwise each story is entirely true. I have done so because this book is not about the individuals involved in the cases I have described, but about what we can learn from the events that took place and how they shape our society. Every family law chapter is the result of blending several different cases together and presenting it as one when it is really a mash of many. In these too, names, descriptions, genders and locations have all been changed. This is to preserve the anonymity the family courts demand, but it also shows how, so often, the issues are the same even when the facts are different. In my ‘Notes on the Law’ I have explained any technical terms and supporting statistics, and given details of any changes to law and procedure.

  Following a case from its beginning to its end you will learn something of the law and its process. I hope you will also discover what it feels like to be the one in the wig, standing up before judge and jury as an instrument of the system. This is not a book of anecdotes; it is a book of people. These are stories of heartache and humour, of high drama and quiet pain, which have challenged my preconceptions and taught me that nothing is ever one thing. For me each case brought to life ideas which otherwise so often appear in abstract: fairness, justice, truth. I hope that, in reading them, they do the same for you.

  1

  Dominic

  Oxford Magistrates’ Court

  and Oxford Crown Court

  Children and Young Persons Act 1933

  Section 50 – Age of criminal responsibility

  It shall be conclusively presumed that no child under the age of ten years can be guilty of any offence.

  DOMINIC FELT THE metal tang of blood in his mouth as he ran, fast, through the tunnel. His breath came out in rasps, echoing against the brick. He could hear the footsteps of the five police officers as they entered the mouth of the underpass behind him. The muscles in his legs burned as he tore out of the gloom and into the summer dusk, and he felt his knees weaken. He stumbled, slowed, and came to a stop. Panting hard, he bent and rested his hands on his thighs. Lifting his head, he looked at the hill path ahead of him. He was never going to make it. Almost with relief, he stood and staggered back to the exit of the tunnel, waiting for the officers to reach him. He leaned back against the raw brick and realized that he was still very drunk. As the officers got closer, Dom held up his left hand towards them, palm outwards, and looked down to spit out a shining gobbet of saliva. A moment later, he felt himself taken forward with a force so great it sent him face downwards on to the dirt path. He recognized the wrench in his shoulders as his arms were pulled back, and the rub of metal to his wrist bones as handcuffs closed around them. He felt the deeper pain of a thick-soled boot in his ribs, on his spine; the full weight of a grown man kneeling on the back of his legs. He managed to turn his head just in time to see the tread of a large black boot closing down upon his face. In the background he could hear his friend, Caz, who had now caught up with them, screaming. As his body buckled, Dom remembered, almost in abstract, that it was his nineteenth birthday.

  When I was at law school I was taught to memorize things I would rarely use again. The difference between various types of Will. How to distinguish a joint tenancy and a tenancy-in-common. Why an ‘invitation to treat’ was not as exciting as it sounded. What I was not taught was how to represent a child.1

  In my first few years as a barrister I realized that this was a skill so vital I must master it for myself. I began to understand that representing those charged with a criminal offence meant that I was more than just a source of advice, or a mouthpiece for my client’s case. I needed to be a psychiatrist, a counsellor, a social worker, a mother, and many other things besides, none of which had appeared on the pages of my law books. I had to learn how to identify mental health problems, victims of domestic abuse, alcohol and drug addictions. I grew to know who might, after court had finished, go home and try to end their life.

  But the cases that first asked the most of me were those in the youth court. I would sit with my teenage clients in the hallway of the courthouse, trying to take their instructions on the trial they were about to face as they stared at their phones, or the floor, or the sky through the window, or anywhere but at me. I became familiar with courtrooms made up of desks rather than benches. Our hearings had breaks to maintain their short attention spans, and reminders to use language my child offender could understand. I learned to play paper-scissors-stone with my younger clients under the desk, to keep them occupied while we waited for the magistrates to return with their inevitable guilty verdicts. I worked out how to talk to twelve-year-olds in a Ritalin stupor; how to ask them about the summer when they robbed, threatened and stabbed their way through the nights. I also discovered, crucially, that my clients did not want me to try to be their friend. Too often they wou
ld treat the social worker – who came in lieu of an absent parent, with a sing-song voice and attempts at camaraderie – with withering contempt. I tried to convince my young clients that deference was not the same as weakness. In doing so I gained their trust and, occasionally, respect. This respect would enable me to hush the gang of twenty waiting in the corridor for their missing member; or to chase my teenage client down the court stairwell, persuading them to come back to the courtroom and face their custodial sentence.

  When I first met Dominic he had turned eighteen, and so, now technically an adult, his criminal career had moved from the youth court up to the magistrates’ and crown courts. But it was the youth court that marked his first conviction for burglary, not long after his eleventh birthday. In that same year, still not into adolescence, Dominic was sentenced twice more, just three months apart. If he had lived anywhere else in Europe he would, at eleven years old, still have been considered a child. But Dominic lived in England and so, from the age of ten, he was old enough to be a criminal.2 Over the three years following his first conviction, another four burglary offences were added to his record. Then, at fourteen, a period of forced respite came with his first incarceration. He entered adulthood, therefore, as someone already marked – the landscape of his future shrunk to a single pathway, leading in only one direction.3

  Over the years Dominic had developed – or been taught – an old-fashioned kind of criminal code. Never grass anyone up. Treat the police, sex offenders and men who hit women with contempt and violence, but your lawyers with respect. Burglaries should only ever be commercial, not domestic – it is not right to break into people’s homes. Bigger shops were worth less guilt, as they all had insurance and the staff turnover was high, and no one really cared about working there anyway. But post offices and independent retailers deserved letters of apology which said he knew he would be sent down but, when he got out, could he come and work there for free, to make it up to them? And if you were stupid enough to get caught, then you pleaded guilty – but only if the evidence was there to get you. Whenever I walked down into the bowels of court and to our conference room in the cells, Dom would stand up to greet me – Morning, Miss! – as though I were his headmistress and he was in detention.

  But when I was first given one of Dominic’s cases, I did not know any of this about him. I only knew that he had been charged with assaulting three police officers, and that his solicitor would pay me £125 to set off to Oxford Magistrates’ Court for the next two days to represent him at his trial.4

  The case papers arrived in my pigeonhole in chambers – as was always the way before they were sent digitally – and I read through them with a sinking heart. Now nineteen, Dom had as many pages of previous convictions as years of life. He would surely have to plead guilty, I thought, scanning through the police officers’ statements. They were almost identical, although I knew from experience that the officers would deny, with expressions of horror, any suggestion of collusion.

  I wondered who was likely to be prosecuting the trial. The magistrates’ court – unlike the crown court – rarely has independent barristers representing the state. Instead, the Crown Prosecution Service will often send the same in-house lawyer to court. There they will prosecute each and every case which comes into their courtroom that day. This, inevitably, means they are as much a part of the place as the legal advisor, who runs the court and advises the magistrates on the law; or the court ushers, who rush in and out of court with flapping black gowns, ensuring everyone is where they need to be; or the magistrates, the panel of three citizens who volunteer to sit in judgment on those who appear before them. Walking into this as a defence barrister can be a lonely business. In those early years, when I would walk into a magistrates’ courtroom to find the prosecutor sharing a joke with the legal advisor and the court usher, the chances of an acquittal seemed to melt in my hands. So I worked hard to push myself in; to make sure they liked me, trusted me, had confidence that I knew what I was doing. In part, that trust was formed by an understanding that I had carefully read and understood the evidence against my client and, if the case was hopeless, that I had told my client so. And, I conceded, zipping Dominic’s case papers into my wheelie bag, there was no trial so hopeless as five police officers giving evidence against a nineteen-year-old with whom they were so familiar that all were on first-name terms.

  Two days later, I walked across the forecourt of Oxford train station. I decided to take the back route to court and, as I bumped my case down the steps and walked alongside the river, I noticed it was lined with spring wildflowers. At the end of the path I turned the corner and rattled my bag over the cobbles and through the quiet, winding lanes. Eventually I came to the rectangular brick building, ingloriously overlooking a car park, that is the magistrates’ court. Opposite the court, almost hidden, is an alleyway. Standing there in the sunshine, I longed to cross towards it and wind my way down its narrow path. I knew that, were I to do so, I would come out opposite the crested gates of Christ Church, its meadow heavy with life about to burst into bloom. Instead I turned away, and walked towards the court, preparing myself to do what I could, in the hour we had before his case began, to persuade my client not to have a trial.

  I moved past the people dragging on the end of a last cigarette, before hauling my bag past the security guards and up the long flight of stairs into court. Oxford Magistrates’ Court is set along one floor. One wall is lined with a row of tiny brick conference rooms, the other punctuated by double swing doors leading to four courtrooms, and a small thin door leading to the windowless advocates’ room. The main part of the floor is taken up by a waiting area filled with rows of bolted-down seats and the noisy chaos of those waiting their turn on the wheel of justice. Once you have pushed open the heavy oak doors to the courtroom, however, all inside is quiet grandeur. The doors are stained dark brown and covered with the same studded green leather that pads the three magistrates’ chairs, elevated at one end. These look down on two rows of advocates’ benches and – at the back of court – a glass-slatted dock.

  That morning, I walked into the courtroom to find the prosecutor in Dominic’s trial alone, going through her papers. I knew this was probably the first time she had ever seen them. I greeted her cheerfully and checked to see which of the police officers had arrived, ready to give evidence. She asked, half-joking, whether we were ‘really going to waste the day on such a hopeless trial’. I smiled in response, and said I had to go and find my client. As I pushed open the courtroom doors I longed to be able to turn and promise her that I would be back within the hour, ready to watch my client plead guilty to all three charges.

  But then I met Dominic.

  I stood in the waiting room and called his name. A tall, slim boy with dark curly hair and hard blue eyes rose in answer, picked up his bag and came towards me with a languid confidence. He had been waiting with a gang of friends who had come to watch his trial from the court’s public gallery. Among this cluster of boys sat two girls. One was Caz, his co-defendant, and the other Dom’s older sister, Rosie. I could feel the frisson among the group, and knew from experience what sport Dom’s friends would make of the trial, rising to their feet upon his inevitable conviction, and hurling swear words and outrage at us all.

  Dominic and I sat opposite one another in one of the conference rooms. He had a frenetic energy to him, but there was a misplaced nobility about his face, as though it belonged to a time of aristocratic hedonism. He listened carefully as I went through the evidence and tested the version of events he had told the solicitors. His case was simple: it was the officers who had assaulted him, not the other way round. He had been drinking in town with some friends, celebrating his birthday. He heard a police officer call out to him, summoning him over, but instead of obliging he had run away, for no reason other than he did not want to be stopped and searched, again.5 The police had followed him, thrown him to the ground, then kicked and punched him. Caz had run after the police when they gave chase
, and when she saw the officers on top of Dom she had tried to pull them off. When their attention turned to Caz, Dom had seen his moment and tried to escape. With handcuffed wrists still behind his back, he had soon been caught by the officers. They had put him on the ground again and sprayed CS gas straight into his face, before hustling him into a police van and arresting him for assault.

  I glanced at my notebook and the chart that I had prepared of the officers’ evidence, sighed, and warned Dom to prepare himself to be disbelieved. They were police officers and he was Dominic, and that was life. But Dom did not care. He did not care whether the police thought he was scum, or whether the magistrates were irritated by the cost in time and public money, and the taking of five officers off the streets to answer to someone like him. He did not even really care about the punishment he got. What he cared about, he told me, was pleading guilty to something he did not do. If he was found guilty then so be it, but he could not – would not – plead to it. Then he reached down and pulled a bundle of photographs from his bag. They had been taken by his sister, Rosie, after she collected him from the police station the day after the alleged offence, Dom said. The date and time were stamped on the pictures in red digits. Rosie would give evidence to say when she had taken the photographs and what his injuries had looked like. I paused, staring at the pictures, then pulled out the transcript of his police interview, skipping through to the last section. Dom knew well enough that simply alleging he had been injured by the officers would never be enough, so he had got the interviewing officers to confirm his injuries, on tape. I checked the interview against the photographs. Sure enough, the officers had agreed they could see red bruising and grazes to his ribs, his back and down the side of his face; cuts to the back of his hand; a lump and graze to his right temple; a lump and a cut to the middle of his forehead. The bruises had come out overnight and bloomed into green and purple welts, flashed by the camera into technicoloured glory.