And Now For Something Completely Different

I am grateful to the Policeman's Blog for this wonderful link to a police blog that is a total contrast to the UK-based police blogs that we are used to.

Little Victories

The immortal Norman Stanley Fletcher in 'Porridge' advised Godber, his cellmate, to cope with being inside by aiming for little victories. In this way he could retain self-respect without causing the kind of trouble that might invite retribution, either from the authorities of from fellow cons.

On the Bench we face a constant struggle to get cases moving and to resist delay unless it is completely unavoidable. The old culture of relaxed three week adjournments (in which we always suspected that nothing was done until the day before the hearing) still lingers in the minds of many defence and prosecution lawyers, but we must now, in the word of the moment, be 'robust' in our enquiries, and to insist that matters progress.

I am still preening myself over a case in the Spring when the defence asked for two weeks to view a CCTV tape, and I sent him and his client across to the police station to view it. What they saw prompted a guilty plea, and we were able to sentence that afternoon.

Last week a lawyer asked for two weeks to make representations to the CPS in what looked like a tentative offer of a plea bargain. The CPS lawyer in court pointed out that the two charges faced by the client were quite different, albeit arising from one incident, and had already been reviewed by a senior prosecutor, so no deal. At this point the clerk read the parties the Riot Act about blatant plea bargaining in open court (of course it happens, but we aren't supposed to admit it). We refused the adjournment and insisted that pleas were entered. A whispered conversation between lawyer and client resulted in two guilty pleas. Neither offence was particularly serious, but one of them carried enough penalty points to push the offender over the magic twelve points on his already 9-point licence, so we disqualified him from driving for six months on top of his fines.

A small victory, but justice was done quickly and public money was saved. I'll settle for that.

All Change For Legal Aid

The Criminal Solicitor has a piece about the forthcoming changes to Legal Aid. The first of a series of reforms will see the means test reintroduced this Autumn. This test was abolished a few years ago because it cost more to collect than it yielded, and slowed up the progress of cases. I don't know what is supposed to be different this time round, but I have a nasty feeling that we shall once again get bogged down in the practical difficulties of getting reliable information about their means from the high proportion of our customers who have disorganised lifestyles and who live hand to mouth from one Giro to the next. How we are supposed to reconcile this with the need to get cases moving as soon as possible remains to be seen.

The Carter reforms to Legal Aid will have the effect of forcing smaller law firms to merge or to give up crimnal work altogether, as the Government intends to drive down costs by awarding blocks of work to large firms that can offer economies of scale. Our town, like most, has a couple of dominant firms on the High Street. The word is that the kind of rates that are likely to be paid in future may cause the partners in highly profitable corporate departments to consider withdrawing their firm from criminal work altogether.

Sensible Advice

If you are driving along while using your mobile phone, and if a policeman (who is passing by in his car) calls to you to stop using the phone, do not, repeat not, shout back to the officer telling him to fuck off. When he advises you to moderate your language, avoid repeating the original response, and telling him that he is a useless wanker.

The above advice becomes even more important when you consider that there is a stash of cannabis in your pocket.

Ignore the above, and you may expect a fine for the phone, a fine for the bad language, and a fine for the cannabis.

There is no specific offence of being stupid, but if there were, we would see it committed every day.

Liquid Larceny

There is a lucrative conspiracy against the public that goes about its work every day, and yet results in almost no prosecutions.

The more observant among you will be aware that I like to take the occasional pint or two of beer in the pub with my friends. I can confidently assert that almost every pint of draught beer sold is short measure, by between five and ten percent, and that this is deliberate policy to increase profits. (Before anyone from the Midlands and North jumps in, I am talking about London and the South here - the rest of the country has the nous to insist on paying for a pint and getting a pint).

In my time on the Bench I have only ever seen one prosecution of a landlord and that was for watering his beer. He added 12% water to premium lager, which at today's prices represents a theft of nearly 40p every time that he sells a pint.

The Government, by comparing the tax take from beer delivered to pubs with the tax take from beer sold by pubs estimates that the total fraud amounts to more than £150 million per year. I have seen a new barmaid being trained by her manager. "Always put a nice head on the beer" he said, "That way we don't get any bad stocks".

Worse, if you ask for the beer to be topped up, as almost nobody does, you face the near-certainty of a snide remark and a grudging top-up. Other little fiddles involve charging 25p to add lime or lemonade to lager while allowing nothing for the lager that is displaced, and charging the same for a pint of shandy as for a pint of beer, when lemonade from a dispensing unit only costs a few pence per pint.

Go into Tescos and buy a pound (all right, 454 grams then) of sausages, and you will get a pound. If they are short weight Tesco stand to be prosecuted, and indeed will be. Time after time MPs have tried to pass a law insisting that beer is honestly dispensed, and time after time the Government has weaselled out of doing anything.

I wonder why?

Notes From The Bench

I did a day of odds-and-ends this week, since the trial on which I was scheduled to sit turned into a guilty plea at the last minute, leaving us free to help other courts. We saw a small builder who had been a bit over-enthusiastic in loading his van; its plated weight is 3.5 tons, and he had overloaded it by a further ton-and-a-half. He finished up with fines and costs plus points on his licence. He had also been banned from proceeding at the roadside until the excess was offloaded and had all the bother of getting someone to make a 200-mile round trip to pick it up. Another fellow turned up so drunk that his lawyer could get no sense out of him, so we were obliged to put the case off. I gave the lawyer a stern warning, to be passed on to his client when he is next sober, that if the only way we could get him into court in a fit state to be dealt with was by way of a remand in custody, that's what we would do. We saw a man who had been disturbed in the act of trying to steal something, and who took off like a hare. Unluckily for him the police had a dog with them, and it tracked him to the garden in which he was hiding. Unwisely, he kicked the dog, at which it sank its teeth into his leg and held on until the handler arrived. We granted a number of warrants to Immigration to search for Zimbabwean nationals whose protection from deportation was removed by a higher court this week, and for some more of the convicted criminals who should have been deported but were not, a fact that cost Charles Clarke his job. We authorised police to hold on to various sums of money seized from suspects under the Proceeds of Crime Act, which we usually do for three months in the first instance. Someone referred to a case involving counterfeit Viagra, and, the court being empty of members of the public, I asked the clerk if the defendant faced a stiff sentence, at which the lady prosecutor suffered a momentary loss of composure.
We finished the day with a couple of Pre-Sentence Reports cases, both of which were messy to deal with. One had a drug problem, one was an alcoholic with mental health issues, and in neither case could we sentence in the way we would have liked. Off to the pub at 5.30.

By The Way

We didn't get a gong at the New Statesman New Media Awards the other day, but we did have a nice evening out at the Serpentine Gallery, with champagne and excellent canapes provided by the magazine. David Miliband gave out the prizes and Peter Tatchell made a bit of a speech along with Geoffrey Robinson, the very rich owner of the mag. I was tempted to tell Peter Tatchell that he looked different without handcuffs on, but I decided that he might take it the wrong way.

Custody Minus

The Telegraph
confirms what I have been saying for some time, that the sentencing reforms that were a key feature of the 2003 Criminal Justice Act are dead in the water. It is typical of the Government's approach to introduce radical reforms without thinking through the resource implications. The Probation Service is struggling to cope with its present workload, and insiders say that it will be some years before NOMS (the combined prison and probation services) has any chance to settle down. The thousands of offenders requiring programmes under Custody Plus would have been the last straw. In addition, although nobody is admitting it, there is a strong suspicion that the community element of the sentences would have been widely breached in between a quarter and a half of cases, resulting in an insupportable surge in the prison population.

There is no certainly that Custody Plus will be resurrected soon, or indeed ever. That leaves the question of magistrates' sentencing powers. There is real benefit to be had from allowing us to do more of the low-to-medium level work that is dealt with by the Crown Court. A surprisingly large proportion of cases that we send up receive sentences of less than the 12 months that magistrates were to have been allowed to impose. I have a feeling that this one will be quietly allowed to simmer on the back burner until a time when the politicians and civil servants involved in this fiasco have moved on.

Reality Catches Up With Fiction - Again

I recently posted this.

It didn't take long for Ken Livingstone to come up with the idea of putting number plates on bicycles did it? People next?

Hooky Screws

I am not in the least bit surprised to read of suspicions that many prison staff, including officers and non-uniformed staff, corruptly take drugs and other contraband into their establishments. Quite apart from the chance of a profit, many officers see drugs as a way of keeping inmates in a compliant drug-soaked haze.

It is a truism that drugs are prison currency, to the extent that newly incarcerated prisoners have the option of asking to go on a drug-free wing in many establishments. Anyone who has visited a prison, as all magistrates must, can see that the opportunity to smuggle in any real quantity of contraband is small. I have taken part in a drug dog demonstration at one establishment where Fido picked out the magistrate who was carrying in about half a minute. (The stuff had been planted by agreement, of course).

The real problem, that we have all been aware of for years, is that the authorities have been terrified of upsetting the Prison Officers'Association, one of the last of the old-style unreconstructed militant unions. I don't know how things are at the moment, but a few years ago at Wormwood Scrubs a number of officers were investigated following allegations of violence against inmates, and it was a close call whether the others all walked off the job in protest.

If the will existed all closed prisons could be virtually drug-free. That they are not is a failure of political and managerial nerve.

The popularity of cocaine and heroin is partly due to the fact that they clear the body relatively quickly, while cannabis traces remain for many days or weeks. With urine tests held at the same time each week, it is safer to use the hard stuff and just lay off for a day or two before test day. There are also suspicions that the tests are not all that random, as some 'clean' prisoners are tested time and again to make the prison's figures look good.