Saturday, July 21, 2012

Slog

They are working us hard these days. Because we have closed several courtrooms more business has to be shoved through the remaining ones. I chaired a remand court yesterday (almost all first time in) and because we still had a dozen in custody at noon we split them between ourselves and the court next door to give the prisoners priority as we must. We didn't get done until half past five.
Despite pressure of business, we still spent the occasional quarter-hour out the back while the lawyers sorted out the kind of things that we mustn't hear.
One drink-driver who had produced an only-just-illegal reading told a tale via the duty solicitor that looked to me as if it might contain the germ of a Special Reasons argument, so I asked the DS if she had advised her client,, and she said yes, but unconvincingly enough for us to retire for  cup of tea while the Clerk made quite sure that the defendant understood what he was doing. He decided not to give it a run, but most solicitors would have had a go; I certainly would.

44 comments:

  1. Even with your 'breaks', I find it hard to think that your decision making was as good between 4.30 and 5.30 as it had been at the start of the day; not, I hasten to add, for any lack of effort on your part.

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    1. PC Harwood had been on duty for 20 hours when he stupidly pushed over Ian Tomlinson. Can we assume you have the same concern and empathy for him?

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    2. Ed (not Bystander)21 July 2012 at 15:31

      You fool. Don't you understand? By joining the police, he is no longer entitled to "due process" or the "presumption of innocence" or "empathy".

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    3. Coco, Bystander knows it's part of the job. When mags are required to sit excessive hours (or any one else for that matter), I am concerned for those people on the receiving end of their decisions. I have great empathy and concern for Ian Tomlinson and his family, though I'm not convinced, in the light of what has come out since the end of the trial, that an excessive period on duty was the key factor determiningg PC Harwood's actions; his colleagues appear to have coped well enough, despite being stressed and tired.

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    4. Ed (not Bystander)21 July 2012 at 18:19

      payasoru, we are all humbled by your vast knowledge and experience of dealing with overwhelming fear, stress and fatigue. Those chairs can be damn uncomfortable, what?

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    5. Ed(NB), please don't kneel; it's not necessary.

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    6. Ed (not Bystander)22 July 2012 at 21:57

      I have never been more certain of anything in my life.

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    7. Italian Lawyer23 July 2012 at 11:46

      Do JPs follow the 45 minutes rule?

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Ed(NB): That's enough. Your tiresome negative and infantile trolling is an irritant to people who come here for a grown-up discussion about a grown up subject. Any more and I shall delete all of your posts as soon as I see them.

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    1. Though I was the only one getting the 'not again' tedious feeling.

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    2. That first word should be 'Thought'. There must be a keyboard that can spell somewhere on eBay.

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    3. This is a particularly 'difficult' blog to post on. The reply panel blocks at the slightest excuse, and seems to have a mind of its own as far as taking spell-checker changes or not. That's my excuse, anyway, and I'm sticking to it! (It is also somewhat idiosyncratic in terms of notifications. I received notice of a new thread yesterday, but pretty soon realised it was a very old post from soon after the big changeover.)

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  4. north bucks jp23 July 2012 at 11:57

    Like Bystander, we struggle to get through customers brought in custody to our remand courts, and twice in the last month we have failed to even start that day's listed cases. We have to call attendees into the court, apologise and adjourn them to a later date, which wastes even more court time. This is not only delaying justice, but is unjust to defendants, who have answered their bail in the expectation that they will get a first hearing. HMCTS does not appear to appreciate what is going on at the coal-face, and remains hell-bent on closing courts, and reducing sittings for lack of legal advisers.

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  5. I'm pretty worried that the duty solicitor didn't appear to have advised on special reasons properly. I'm also at a loss as to why any defendant wouldn't bother to try special reasons if they had even an outside prospect of success.

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  6. The solicitors that I see in front of me run the entire range from 'I know who I would want if I ever needed a solicitor' through to 'have you no idea at all how to string a sentence together, let alone an argument'?

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    1. I think JP's need to start writing Yelp reviews. On the occasions I've had to engage the services of a legal professional sticking a pin in the yellow pages seems to be more successful than anything else. Certainly I've felt that those engaged to 'help' me have achieved less than I have done by reading the forms and filling them in correctly (a task that seems to have been beyond a couple -- fortunately they were not terribly damaging)

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  7. "only just illegal reading"

    Strange, I don't remember that section of the Road Traffic Act.

    "sorry sir/madam, I have to inform you your child has been killed by a drunk driver. However, you can rest assured of justice in your grief, as the magistrates have the drivers best interests at heart, and state were they representing this criminal, would do their utmost to reduce the impact on him"

    Having cleaned up the mangled bodies of a number of victims of such criminals, I hope you are never on the receiving end.

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    1. You're conflating. Causing death by dangerous driving is an offence regardless of the blood alcohol level.

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  8. Say this defendant had had his drink spiked, or been assured that the drink he was given as a designated driver was alcohol free, would you reject any suggestion to that effect out of hand, ignore what he had said, just assumed that the DS had explored this issue fully (or not give a damn) and simply ride roughshod over the evidence?

    The alternative is to do what BS did, and check that this wasn't going to be a kangaroo court. Nothing to do with having any one individual's interests at heart, but rather acting in the interests of justice for all. My own view is that someone who knowingly spikes another's drink, or tells them that they've given them a soft drink when in fact it contains alcohol is a pretty despicable individual, and we shouldn't brush such evidence under the carpet either for the sake of expediency or because we think that there are no shades of grey in the spectrum of justice.

    Quite why it's necessary to distort what someone has written or said in order to get your point across (that drink driving kills - which we all know) defeats me, as all it ends up doing is undermining your credibility and the force of any argument you're trying to make.

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    1. This was done to me several years ago - it ended up being more costly for the person concerned as I was aware enough to realise that the level of my "coke" had gone up while I was in the lavatory. They ended up paying for taxis home for all, and one back for me the next day to collect my car. They have never done it again......

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  9. Honest guv, wasn't me, it was some other bloke who spiked my drinks with alcohol. All several of them which I never noticed.

    Exactly how much alcohol do you think you need to consume to be just over the limit ?

    It's not one glass of wine, trust me. Nor is it one soft drink spiked. But if that's the defence argument you wish to believe, then I might suggest it's your credibility in having any knowledge of the subject which is at risk of being laughable.

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    1. for a BAC of 0.8: A 13st man four drinks in an hour, or about two for a 120-lb woman. Given a 'drink' is a single or half a pint, a pint with a double in it will almost certainly put any drinker over the top.

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  10. As I said above, distorting what someone has written or said simply to get your own (tangential) point across not only undermines your credibility but also the force of any argument you're trying to push. One thing magistrates have all received numerous hours of training in is drink driving and the significance of the various levels (we had Sir Peter North talk to us not long ago, explaining the thinking behind his own recommendations to Government). BS is much better able to explain his own thinking than I, but what I understood him to say was that for justice to be done, it does need to be seen to be done, and it's much better to have the facts out than make crass and prejudiced assumptions (such as suggesting that any bench ever "wishes to believe" a particular version, and distorts the facts accordingly - I suggest that your comments might suggest that you are transposing your own thought processes onto others). Certainly, there is nothing laughable in the subject at hand.

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  11. "Working us hard" is only the beginning. The 'Flexible CJS' initiative (including Sunday courts) is designed to establish the longer working hours/days necessary for the bigger courts to absorb the work of the smaller ones, whose closure will be announced in the Autumn. Of course there has recently been one round, so "smaller" in this context means courts serving metropolitan populations of up to 250,000. While it's doubtful that anything can stop this juggernaut, there is likely to be some serious angst for the government to field before they get this one home. Lay magistrates are being sidelined into Neighbourhood Justice Panels and the like, while District Judge appointments continue against a backdrop of falling workload. How all this sits with the much-touted "big society" notion is anybody's guess. But the magistracy is being slowly but surely strangled. Does anybody out there care?

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    1. Not really- I don't suppose villains give a shit a bit like the public at large and by that I mean the public- not Telegraph readers

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  12. I sat some years ago when we had a spiked drinks argument.To ou surprise the spiker gave evidence. To everybody's surprise we insisted on binding him over as a party to criminal proceedings. Always do things meticulously is the motto

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  13. Absolutely right Anon.(21.34). The process has been accelerating during the past 5 years and the frequent statements from Governments and Senior Judiciary that magistrates are essential and valued have been known to be patent nonsense for a long time.
    I am surprised that BS never, as far as I have seen,expresses a view.

    As a Central London magistrate who has seen the competence and ability of 'lay' justices raised considerably over the years, I know that I would rather be judged and sentenced if guilty by a tribunal of 3 than by a single DJ who may be prejudiced, case hardened or, as somtimes happens, incompetent. However, there are contributors to this blog who seem quite vituperative about magistrates and I often wonder why when their experience is probably quite limited.

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  14. Bowsreetrunner24 July 2012 at 09:56

    The informalisation of the courts is a bad thing.
    it is not suppossed to be a social day out for the scroates or a way for the middleclass to turn up and have a nice little knitting circle interspersed with a bit of justice.
    It is supposed to do justice- show societies displeasure at breaking the law nad absolve those who have been wrongly been accused. It is supposed to disrupt your life, make you think and hopefully put you off doing it again.
    Yes, there is a case for opening maybe a little longer and maybe a saturday morning but I would draw the line there. Sundays are for God or reflections in a secular society and the nights are for deamons. The Nazi's had a think for people disappearing in the night and courts working in odd ways we don't want that here.
    The trouble is it costs and we need to reforem and simplify the law and get businesss dealt with at the right level- that should do the trick

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    1. "The Nazi's had a think for people disappearing in the night and courts working in odd ways we don't want that here."

      hmmmm

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  15. Legally_blonde24 July 2012 at 18:10

    I have been asked to start a trial at 4:30 before now. When defence and I argued with the bench saying we thought it was too late we got told 'justice delayed is justice denied' and it was made very clear to us we were expected to stay. We did. Court at gone 7pm. Is that really what 'stop delaying justice' is all about? It is only going to get worse.

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  16. It's still not been made entirely clear who, amongst court staff in particular, are going to man (or woman) these late or off site sittings etc. Are the few clerks we have left going to do shift work? Won't that simply mean that fewer courts will be able to sit during the day as those clerks on 'night' duty get a few precious hours at rest? Are we suddenly going to see a massive recruitment drive within HMCTS (sorry, I just fell off my seat laughing as I typed that).

    I realised yesterday that there is to be yet more consolidation withing the Deputy Justices Clerk ranks...you can only squeeze the oranges so much...evenutally all you get left are pips

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    1. The reduction of the Deputy posts was a foregone conclusion of the "consultation" regarding the number of Justices' Clerks in future. Some of us involved in that consultation pointed out that the biggest single saving in salary costs came from the reduction in Deputies. That had it been decided to reduce the number regardless was obvious because whichever of the proposed number of JCs was to be - there were four distinct proposals varying from 1 to 49 - the new number of deputies was included at 75 (down from over 150).
      Unsurprisingly, there was no supporting evidence or argument for this apparently arbitrary outcome.
      As on so many occasions these days, there was proposal, consultation and decision - but not necessarily in that order.

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    2. Silent In Court25 July 2012 at 17:43

      "Are we suddenly going to see a massive recruitment drive within HMCTS (sorry, I just fell off my seat laughing as I typed that)."

      Well funnily enough in a way yes..... But then its amazing how much further money goes when you can pay someone half the wages of a Court Clerk and attach them to a DJ... It's a brave new world.

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  17. It all sounds good on paper but in reality won't work

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    1. @tee& .... "It all sounds good on paper but in reality won't work"

      May I offer 'the public domain' - these Acronyms created some years ago for "A Large Voluntary Organisation" by myself and a few friends

      LIONS - "Local Interpretation Of National Standards"
      ('I know - but WE don't do it that way')

      TIGER - "Total Incompetent Given Enhanced Responsibility" (See 'The Peter Principle) for details)

      LEOPARDS - "Looks Excellent On Paper, And Reality = 'Diddly-Squat'

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    2. I have been known to commend work as Carefully Researched And Prepared.

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    3. Mjolinir , have we met before ...

      the list is missing BEARS

      b****** Elders Acting Really Stubbornly , the B***s is not casting aspirtaions on people;s parenthood, just it would identify the 'large , well known, charitable organisation ' with regard to it;s pre 1967 name ...

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  18. Uh-huh -@Bowstreet - Godwin's Law invoked! Discussion now null & void.

    (IF anyone wants to get serious on the 'No work on Holy Day' concept - ensure "Equality & Diversity" &c - Court admins are going to need a lot of 'personal information' about all Parties to forthcoming cases - and calendars programmed with quite a complex bit of software.)

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    1. 1. Willingness to work Sundays then also a selection criterion for hiring court staff ?

      2. If shopping hours are restricted to six on a Sunday, then why not Mags Cts ? It would be amusing when a full-day Sunday court tried an excessive Sunday hours retailer.

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  19. @Tony Frost - "It would be amusing when a full-day Sunday court tried an excessive Sunday hours retailer."

    Would it be necessary to provide an affidavit from a suitably qualified Surveyor - that the 'Court premises' didn't have a relevant floor area in excess of 280 square metres??

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  20. The idea of saturday courts is being piloted in County Durham. They are not extra courts - mid week courts are being cancelled to accomodate them. I understand that the only trials which have been listed involve unrepresented defendants as local solicitors have refused to co operate!! Legal advisers will be entitled to claim overtime as will prosecutors. It is difficult to see who is benefitting from the process.

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Posts are pre-moderated. Please bear with us if this takes a little time, but the number of bores and obsessives was getting out of hand, as were the fake comments advertising rubbish.