The Defence Brief

The Criminal Justice System is not the place for vulnerable kids Today I took a break from my usual diet of drink driving  to covered a stint as youth court duty solicitor for someone who couldn’t make it. I haven’t been a youth court duty for quite a long time but it wasn’t too bad. I arrived bright and early at 9.30am ready to collect my papers for the day and get to work. But, there were no papers and nobody in need of representation. I found a room, did some work until lunch time then sat back with a couple of episodes of the X Files for an hour and a half (thank you Amazon Prime). Just as the second episode ended (it was the one with the secretary whose boss was murdered and who is now protecting her from terrorists and his former business partner from beyond the grave) I got a call telling me that there was, at last, somebody for me to see. Dashing up to the CPS room, I collected the papers and then ran to the cells to see my new client. It’s ages since I’ve ...

Joe Lawton, who committed suicide after a drink driving arrest I read today of the inquest into the death of a 17-year-old who committed suicide in August 2012 after being arrested for drink driving two-days earlier. There is a view among many that people who drink and drive are irredeemably evil and deserve nothing but the hatred of society.  My specialism is defending people accused of drink driving offences ; I used to use Twitter quite a lot and on Twitter a well-know TV doctor once made a sly dig in my direction along the lines of you have the right name for somebody who represents drink drivers .  My name, of course, is Nick Diable and Old Nick is one of the names of the Devil while Diable is the French word for Devil.  I can only presume that he was implying that drink drivers are all as evil as the Devil. The truth is that some of those accused of drink driving are not guilty at all.  While the overwhelming majority of accused people (even the ...

Amira Abase, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Shamima Begum, 15, at Gatwick airport Last week three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green in east London secretly met and began travelling from the UK to Syria where they intend to join Islamic State (ISIS).  The thing that struck me most was not that they made this journey but that so many people in the UK have such a heartless attitude to the three girls. Many people on Facebook and Twitter take the view that the girls are little more than terrorists and deserve what’s coming their way.  In the Independent, Grace Dent called the girls “ISIS fangirls” and went on to say that children running away to join ISIS should not be allowed to return to the UK. I can understand why somebody would take that attitude but I don’t think it is a position that holds up to analysis. Some years ago I represented a man who groomed children for sex.  I’ve met quite a few such men but this one was by far the most successful I’ve come acro...

This morning I read a report on the BBC news website saying that Barnardo's claim that child victims of sexual exploitation are being failed by the Criminal Justice System . There are a number of different offences that you might chose to call child exploitation that range from rape of a child aged under 13 through to causing a child to watch a sexual act.  In between are offences such as meeting a child following sexual grooming and abusing a position of trust (which unlike other offences has an age of consent of 18-years not 16-years, so if a teacher had sex with a 17-year-old student with his or her consent the teacher would be guilty of an offences). In criminal law, to secure a conviction the prosecution must make an allegation (the charge or indictment) and must then prove so that the jury are sure (in old language this was beyond reasonable doubt) that the defendant is guilty of the offence charged or indicted.  The proof is shown by producing evidence, which could ...

I stumbled onto a copy of "Working with women prisoners" on the Prison Service website while looking for a copy of the Prison Rules. One of the most remarkable things that stood out in the document for me is the table of who is looking after the women prisoners' children while they are in prison. Just 9% are cared for by their fathers; while 8% are in care.  A relatively massive 24% go to grandparents and 17% to a "female relative".  So, almost twice as many children are cared for by a general female relative as opposed to by their dad. From my own experience, it is far more common for me to deal with a youth who has little or no contact with his dad than it is to deal with one who has regular contact with daddy.  I've also dealt with a few who have no contact with their mums and they are often the most screwed up kids of the lot. I was never a fan of the old Tory governments witch hunts against single mothers, but I do think that a lack of family co...

I read in the Times today about the case of a real-life cindarella (because of the paywall I cannot link to the Times, so here is the Australian Telegraph's reporting of the story). I don't know if the accusations are true or not.  But, sadly they are nothing I haven't come across a dozen times in case papers and in other newspapers in the past. Sadly, the most unusual thing about these allegations from my experience is the lack of sexual abuse. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who has had a run in with social services over their children and has thought how terrible social workers all are for intruding in their lives.  But, when people act like this towards their own children I find myself asking whether social workers shouldn't be more intrusive!