More Code

These coded phrases, which I have accompanied with translations, will be uttered in a court near you next week, in all probability, and for many weeks to come:-

“I would be grateful if the Bench would agree to retire for a short while, as there are representations that I would like to make the Crown. I may then be in a position to shorten matters”. = I first met the client ten minutes ago. The brief that was biked over from Chambers last night gave me no real feel for the case, but I can now see that he’s a goner. If I can get the CPS to ease off on a couple of details, I’ll get my man to put his hands up and take a bit of credit for a late plea.

“Unfortunately, on this occasion, my client let his frustration get the better of him” = He is a violent thug.

“My client is eager to put his life in order, and has a job to start on Monday” = He last worked in 2001 for four days, overslept, and never went back.

“I never got no letter from the court and nobody phoned me.” = I threw my bail sheet in the bin after the last hearing.

“I only bought the car that day” = I have been driving untaxed and uninsured for six months.

“I found the credit card in the street” = I stole it

“I found the car unlocked and with the keys in the ignition” = I stole it

“I paid for the bag of carrots, but I absent-mindedly put the whisky in my other bag” = I stole it.

“The drugs were for my personal use” = I like to keep forty wraps on me in case my brother steals them from my bedroom. The scales? I’m looking after them for a friend.

“I thought my ban had expired” = It was raining. I don’t walk anywhere in the rain.

“My client is willing to comply with any bail conditions that the bench sees fit to apply” = unlike on the four previous occasions when he was bailed.

“I saw that the window had been broken so I went into the house to see that everything was all right. That’s when I must have dropped my cigarette end” = Bloody DNA!

But however many times you have heard it before, you give each one careful consideration, and never ever dismiss it out of hand - once in a while it may just turn out to be true

Wrong Impression

In my private life I make no attempt to hide the fact that I am a magistrate. The very existence of this blog is a testament to my ambition to disperse some of the fog of ignorance and misunderstanding that envelops our courts. Many of my colleagues take a different view, and tell me that no one, other than close family and friends has any idea that they are judicially engaged.

Because I make no secret of what I do, I am often approached, usually for my opinion, but occasionally for advice. I won’t do advice, other than in terms of “Don’t sue, whatever you do” or, almost invariably, “Go and see a solicitor”.
Opinions are different. Nearly everyone has some experience of a brush with the law, be it divorce, speed cameras, nasty neighbours or whatever. At parties, people home in on me. Speeding bores (“It’s all about revenue isn’t it? I’ve got 9 points, but my Porsche is perfectly safe at 110, especially as I am such a good driver”) get short shrift, but sometimes people’s tales make me aware of ways in which the system might do better.

The other weekend someone who had been assaulted (a long time ago, and with no long-term injury) was telling me how aggrieved he felt that his assailant had been acquitted. “They didn’t believe me” he said. Well of course that isn’t right. A perfectly credible witness may give evidence, but in the absence of any corroboration such as an independent witness or a bit of forensic, the bench may be obliged to acquit because the case has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt – that’s not the same as not believing him.
These days we hope to do better. All witnesses are now offered witness support either from a professional or a trained volunteer, so these sort of misunderstandings shouldn’t happen any more.
The current buzz-phrase in the system is “No witness- no justice”. Seems okay to me.

I Told You So

The High Court has overturned the acquittal by a district judge of a policeman who drove very fast indeed while 'testing' a new car. A lay magistrate of this parish blogged this at the time.

There are probably a few unpaid and unqualified lay magistrates who are unable to suppress a small sigh of satisfaction at this news.

The question whether 159 mph on a motorway is dangerous is one to look at on a case by case basis, but I can see no excuse for doing 90 in a 30, whatever the time of day or night.

I wonder if they will give the case to another DJ or to a lay bench this time? Whoever gets it will have to face a full press bench!

Tell Me About It!

This not only has the ring of truth, but adds to the argument that much of the last two decades' decline in public decency is down to the tabloid press.

Floreat Etona

Posh lawyers don't spend a lot of time in the magistrates'court. A few young barristers who fancy a life of crime flit through the grubby end of the trade on their way to the Crown Court and the Old Bailey, but on the whole we get a different type of defence brief.

We were graced one day by the presence of an exquisitely pin-striped and beautifully spoken stiff-collared young man whose haircut was strongly suggestive of Eton College (or Slough Grammar as it was known at my provincial university).

He shimmered to his immaculately-shod feet. "May it please your worships" (running fingers through his mane, removing blonde mop from line of vision) "Due to a happy concatenation of circumstances we find ourselves in a position to progress my client's case this morning".

"Swipe me!" was my first thought. My second was to suppress a grin prompted by my having caught the eye of John Cochrane, a down-to-earth local solicitor who is a fixture in our court, and whose rolling eyes were a dead giveaway of his thoughts.

By chance I bumped into John a few days later in the local pub known as Court Seven. We could not resist talking about Mr. Pinstripe, and I finished up betting John a pound that he couldn't fit in the word 'concatenation' in front of me one day. I lost.

I have subsequently learned that advocates often challenge each other to introduce unlikely words in their address to the court without prompting a rebuke or a query from the chair. The daftest that I have heard of is 'hypostasis'. How the perpetrator got away with that I cannot imagine, but he did, or so he claims.

Compensation Culture

The power to award compensation is one of the magistrates' most important powers. After all, there is a deal of natural justice in making people pay for damage they have caused, even though where the damage is enormous and the perpetrator on £45 a week benefit we sometimes have to take a realistic view. There is a list of suggested injury compensation awards in the Bench Book at page 183 of the pdf file. We may sometimes make a compensation order as a sentence in its own right where criminality is not too high but a victim has suffered a loss.
A court is obliged to consider compensation, but it remains one of the decreasing number of areas where we pretty much have a free hand. If property has been damaged the police may put in a compensation claim, but they often don't and we are thrown back onto Mark 1 Common Sense, which suits me fine. As ordinary citizens members of a bench of magistrates are well placed to make a fair guess at the cost of putting something right, and also, on occasion, to scale back an inflated claim.
Many years ago there was an incident in a pub in which a young man hurled various things across the bar, breaking bottles and glasses, and then scuffled with the manager, ripping the latter's shirt. The victim put in a claim for nearly £2,000. We went through it line-by-line, and found that every bottle on the optics had allegedly been broken, and that every one was full at the time. Funny, that. The manager claimed £140 for his shirt, and various bits and pieces behind the bar came to a hundred here and a hundred there. Unfortunately for him we knew that ten days after the incident the pub had undergone scheduled refurbishments, being gutted and refitted, so the claims to replace various shelves and wooden mouldings referred to stuff that would have been in the skip within a fortnight. Nevertheless the pub was still entitled to reasonable compensation, so we set our own figure of about a fifth of the claim. Nobody seemed surprised.

The Price of Fame

A District Judge at an East London court has remanded Pete Doherty, a pop singer, in custody on drugs charges today. I have nothing to say about Mr. Doherty or about today’s bail decision but I do sympathise with any court that finds itself dealing with someone famous.

We have seen a few such cases, and the first indication that something is up is usually a posse of journalists and cameramen outside the court. We can rely on our court staff to sort out access to the press seats (which will never hold a quarter of those wanting to get in) and organise some sort of pooling arrangement. A couple of local policemen will keep an eye on the crowd, and it is usual to get the case on as early as possible so that the court can then quickly get back to normal and crack on with its daily business.


Magistrates are ordinary people, who read the same papers and watch the same TV as everyone else. The bench will have to brace themselves to treat the case in exactly the same way as any other. The pressure of a full press gallery, and the certainty that the court’s decision will be on the day’s news is a stern test of the magistrates’ training and experience, but they can cope with that.

What happens when the case gets before a jury can be another matter altogether.

Well I Never

Someone asked me the other day why I decided to call the blog 'The Law West of Ealing Broadway', when I have only the most tenuous connection with the place, mostly to do with changing trains on the way into London. I am told that the 'Ealing Gazette' picked up the 'Times' piece and ran a story based on the fact that it was of local interest!

Well of course it was a dim memory of Paul Newman playing Judge Roy Bean in the film of the same name, and the Judge's motto 'The Law West of the Pecos' that made it spring to mind. That was all I knew about the fellow, until the other day I looked him up here.
It turns out that he really existed, and that his courthouse, that also served as a saloon and a jail, has been preserved as a tourist attraction. Apparently he was well known for serving drinks to passengers waiting while their train was fuelled and watered and holding on to their change until the last minute. When the train whistle blew, and the customers swore at him in their hurry to get their change and go he would fine them the exact amount of the change for using bad language.

They don't make them like that any more.

Brian and the ASBO

Thank you for the many comments on the case of Brian. As I expected, the range of sentences ran the full gamut, from releasing him straight away to five years in prison. I shall draw a veil over the more gung-ho posters who preferred capital punishment.

Some people wanted to see him put into compulsory rehab, either in or out of prison. Such facilities are almost entirely non-existent and for short prison sentences offenders are simply warehoused until their release date, because there is no time to organise anything but the most perfunctory programme. This may change in the medium term with the introduction of ‘custody plus’ adding supervision in the community on to the end of a prison sentence.

It’s the ASBO that’s the problem. He was given his when they were still relatively new orders. Since then the higher courts have issued guidelines that discourage their over-use and the imposition of unrealistic conditions. He was ordered not to be drunk in public, and he probably breached that when he walked out of the courthouse door, since he is drunk pretty much all of the time. He probably would not be given a similar order today, but the order is in place, and that’s it.

So we run through the structured sentencing process:-
How serious is the offence of its type? Being drunk – not very. Breaching the ASBO, serious because of repetition and failure to respond to previous sentences.
Is a fine or discharge appropriate? No, he has already been imprisoned twice. Breach of an ASBO is a serious either-way offence.
Is it serious enough for a community penalty? Certainly, but he has been declared unsuitable, so we may not impose one.
Is it so serious that only custody is appropriate? That’s the tricky bit. It probably isn’t, but what else can we do?
Are our powers sufficient or shall we commit to the Crown Court? Following the higher courts’ current thinking the judge is unlikely to give much, if any, more time that we can, certainly nothing like five years. We decide that we will reflect his guilty plea by not sending him upstairs, so the sentence will be six months (of which he will serve half).

If you cast your eyes to the top of the blog, you can see the bit that says where my views differ from the letter of the law I will impose the letter of the law. That’s what’s happening here. A pathetic drunk, of low intellect, will have received a total of eighteen months' imprisonment for offences that normally attract sentences right at the bottom of the tariff, usually a fine. There will be no treatment, and he will not be ‘cured’. He will leave prison clutching his discharge grant and he will head for the nearest off-licence. This cat-and-mouse will go on until his ASBO finally expires or he saves all of us a lot of trouble and succumbs to the drink. Prison is an expensive resource (estimates vary, but £750 per week may not be too far off the mark) and Brian may be lucky and avoid the bullying that is often the fate of the vulnerable and the gormless, or he may not.

Of course, while he is inside decent citizens will be spared the sight and sound of him reeling in the street hurling foul mouthed abuse at all and sundry, and that is a plus point. But is prison really the best that we can come up with?

So those of you who said that there is no answer were, I am afraid, spot on.

On the Wireless

Jeremy Vine (BBC Radio 2) has just trailed the fact that his programme will be doing a piece about magistrates on Friday 27th January. He usually has a rather tabloid take on the news, so I may just end up muttering undeleted expletives at the radio, but I am glad to see anything that improves public awareness of what the courts do and why they do it. There is still a vast chasm of ignorance between the public and the criminal justice system, so I hope that the programme's millions of listeners get a fair picture of how we operate.