In Your Defence

by Sarah Langford

  Before the magistrates could respond, Saba began to speak and, almost without pause, the interpreter switched back into her voice, drawing us into the horror of her marriage.

  When she had finished her evidence it was Asif’s turn. He was wearing dark blue jeans and his stomach bulged against the buttons of his white shirt. Together with his clothes, his accent – of Bradford, not Bangladesh – made him seem a world apart from Saba. Watching him give evidence after Saba I could see only the gulf between them, and his advantage over her.

  In cross-examination his denials were short. Saba, he said, had simply made it all up. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, something that made me pause. Saba’s family, he said, had told him many times that she wanted to return to him, but they kept pushing the date of a reconciliation back. And so instead he had decided he must come to court. And in that moment I saw what Asif’s case was really about and rebuked myself for not having seen it before. Asif’s application was not about his daughter – it was about Saba and his control over her. He could not, by law, force Saba to live with him, but he could ask the court to give him Nazia, knowing that, if it did, Saba would surely follow. She would not be without her child, and Asif knew it.

  ‘Why did you rip up the book, Mr Choudhury?’

  ‘It had a note in it, to my wife, from another man. Like, a love note. I wasn’t going to have that.’

  ‘The note was written before you met?’

  ‘Yes. But she was my wife now, wasn’t she?’

  ‘And so when you married, what was hers became yours?’

  ‘Yes. That’s how it is in our culture.’

  ‘To do with as you wished?’

  ‘It’s natural. She knows and I know what her role as a wife is.’

  ‘A page of the book offended you, so you tore the whole thing up?’

  ‘I’ve already admitted that, haven’t I?’

  ‘Her book, her possessions, her body, her freedom – they all belonged to you …’

  ‘Look, it’s different. Islamically, the wife has only duty for her husband, whether she does it willingly or not.’

  Click. Got him.

  I watched carefully as the magistrates filed back into the courtroom and took their seats. They had been deliberating for nearly two hours and I was nervous that my confidence had been misplaced. Unlike a jury, who are prone to scowl or nod and smile during a case, most magistrates have learned to adopt a mask of professional objectivity. Very rarely do they give any sign that they will find in your favour, but experience and observation have taught me that there is a silent language – a lightness to the face, a twitch, the slightest tip of a head to one side – which hints at agreement. There is one similarity I have found between juror and magistrate. If either is prepared to look at my client as they walk back into the courtroom to give their verdict – to meet their eyes with an open face – then I know we are safe. That afternoon, as the magistrates settled themselves in their chairs, they looked towards Saba and all three of them smiled.

  After they had declared that they found each allegation proved, the lead magistrate looked directly at Saba. Saba Choudhury, she said, had offered little independent evidence in support of her allegations. However, her cultural background, her lack of English, and the bullying and oppressive atmosphere in her family home would have made it exceedingly difficult to confide in anyone about the abuse she had suffered. When questioned at length about the allegations she had answered all that was asked of her, despite her obvious distress. The magistrates found that Saba had been brave and honest. Her evidence, and the way in which she had given it, ensured that they were more than satisfied she had told the truth about what she had been subjected to at the hands of her husband.

  I glanced at Asif, but he was staring straight ahead. Later, after the hearing had finished, he strode from the courtroom. Saba, the interpreter and I then swung open the doors to discover Asif had already gone. Although I did not know it then, that day would be the last time I ever saw him.

  Saba stood before me in the empty corridor as I checked that she had the date for the forthcoming directions hearing, at which the magistrates would decide what should happen next. She did not look at me as the interpreter translated my words, and I wondered if she understood what had just happened. Then, without warning, she staggered backwards on to a chair, put both hands over her face, and wept.

  As I walked from court to the railway station in the late spring afternoon, I pictured the noble face of the interpreter and wondered what he felt, and then remembered the case of Mr Begum and Mr Khan. I wondered if I had been wrong. Maybe, in fact, the law is about more than words and language and weaving a clever argument from the pages of a law book. Maybe it is about more than being able to tell a good story. For, at its heart, the law is about humanity. It is about the thousand little flecks of perception and judgement that spin through the air in a courtroom, across language and class and gender. It is the reason we do not try cases on paper alone, but instead insist on holding up living, breathing flesh, and testing each side with equal strength. And, when we do that and we do it well, I believe that, more often than not, justice is done.

  Six weeks later, I arrived at court for the directions hearing. It was, I realized, almost exactly two years since Saba had been rescued from her marriage. I saw Asif’s barrister coming out of the advocates’ room towards me, her face full of apology. She had just been told, she said, that her client had gone back to Bangladesh. She couldn’t get to the bottom of it, nor could she get a date for Asif’s return. She realized that without instructions she had to come off record. She would make the application and leave me to it. She raised both her hands, palms up, and rolled her eyes.

  Saba and I sat alongside one another in a conference room. Over our shoulders the interpreter translated the new CAFCASS letter, which had been filed with the court the day before. The letter was blunt. In light of the findings of fact, contact between Nazia and her father should remain suspended until a full CAFCASS report could be done. The court should strongly consider making a Residence Order in Saba’s favour to ensure that she was protected in case Asif tried to take Nazia a second time. I put down the letter and told Saba not to worry – Asif was not coming today. He was back in Bangladesh.

  Saba looked at me with an expression I could not read. ‘He is in Bangladesh?’ she asked, in English.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He want a divorce. He go to find a new wife,’ she said, quietly.

  I did not know what to say. If that were true then surely it was a good thing – now Asif would leave her alone. I looked up at the interpreter.

  ‘She is ashamed, I think.’ His voice was kind. ‘She is afraid of embarrassing her family. She is afraid that no one else will want her now.’

  I looked back to Saba, who held my gaze for a moment then reached down to her bag and drew out several large envelopes. They had been sent by Asif – pages from a sari catalogue, the women torn in two. In broken English and translated Bengali she explained that a torn sari represented dishonour. She had, by talking about their marriage, dishonoured Asif and he wanted her to know it. She had not thought he would come to court that day, nor that he would come any other day. He had been humiliated by her and had told her family she was no good. He did not want her any more. He wanted a divorce. She was worried about Nazia, about her not having a father, but feared that because she was a girl she mattered less to Asif than had she been his son. For him it was never about being a father; it was about owning them. If he couldn’t then he was not interested. But if the court could force Asif’s mother to release her passport, then Saba could start to build a new life for herself in this country with the support of her uncle and aunt. She could not go back to Bangladesh, not now. Not with the shame of divorce encircling her.

  We went into court and I told the magistrates of Asif’s request for a divorce, of his harassment of Saba, and of her suspicion about why he was now back in Bangladesh. The magistrates granted m
y request for a Residence Order in Saba’s favour and decided that the onus to bring the matter back to court must now lie with Asif. If he did not do so within three months, his application would be dismissed. Saba’s passport must, they said, be handed over to her solicitors immediately.

  In the crowded waiting room outside court I said goodbye to Saba. Then I turned and shook the interpreter’s hand, thanking him for his help, and noticed the slim elegance of his fingers, his skin smooth and cool. I felt suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for what he had done and how he had done it. The two left the courthouse together as I packed up my bags, and I waved them goodbye, but I was walking to the station in the same direction and I soon caught up with them. They were winding their way through the weekday market, past the stalls full of early Christmas decorations. Something made me slow my pace and lag behind to watch. Saba’s frame was slight against the swell of shoppers around her, but she seemed, despite her obvious difference from everyone else, entirely within herself in a way I had not noticed before. The interpreter was wearing the same tweed suit, immaculately pressed, with seams running down the front and back of his legs in the manner of my grandfather. I could see that they were talking by the way their heads inflected towards each other, and then I saw Saba turn to him in response to something he had said. There was something in the way she dipped her head that made me stop walking and leave them alone as they carried on without me, unaware I was watching them, until, eventually, they were swallowed by the crowd.

  4

  Raymond

  Bournemouth Crown Court

  Theft Act 1968

  Section 9 – Burglary

  (1) A person is guilty of burglary if—…

  (b) having entered any building or part of a building as a trespasser he steals or attempts to steal anything in the building or that part of it or inflicts or attempts to inflict on any person therein any grievous bodily harm.

  MANDY WHITE’S BREATHING was noisy. She groaned and puffed as she bent her large bulk against the wheeled frame she was pushing. The usher hovered behind her, his arms slightly outstretched as though to catch her if she fell. In a moment of excruciating farce, the pair attempted to manoeuvre the contraption around the corner of the bench where I and the prosecutor sat, trying not to look. Mandy White moved the frame forwards and backwards in slight increments within the narrow space, before a final rough shove allowed it to pass through. The usher then guided her to the chair which had been placed at the bottom of the witness box. Mandy White, we had already been told, would not be able to climb up the small steps to the witness box. She sat down heavily, letting go of the frame, and the usher, visibly relieved that the ordeal was over, pushed it to one side of the courtroom. Now she was seated before us, I allowed myself to study her properly for the first time. She was extremely large and her age was hard to guess – she could have been anything from forty to sixty, with a face that mapped life’s hardships in its lines. Her skin was florid, worsened by the hennaed redness of her short-cropped hair. A roll of pallid flesh had escaped between her top and the waist of her leggings and I found myself transfixed by it. To reveal herself in this way seemed a painfully intimate thing to do and I wondered whether she was unaware of the exposure, or too embarrassed to readjust her clothing, or whether she simply did not care.

  The judge leaned down over his bench and urged Mandy to ask for breaks if she needed them or if she was uncomfortable. She stared back at him with an expression somewhere between nonchalance and surprise. I glanced to my right, watching the jury as they took her in. They had just heard the prosecutor’s opening speech and were now able to fit Mandy’s face into the silhouette of victim. Now they could imagine her fear as my twenty-one-year-old client, Raymond Baker, and his seventeen-year-old sister, Daniella, barged their way into Mandy’s ground-floor flat on the estate where she lived.1 They could visualize how frightened she must have been when the intruders loomed over her, fists raised, yelling at her of gangs and guns and what they would do if she did not comply. They could picture her face as my client threw her mobile phone into the corner so she could not call for help; how terrified she must have looked as her flat was ransacked until, at last, they found something they wanted – a DVD player – and, with a violent warning, left. The jury could also now picture Mandy waiting helplessly until she was sure she was alone before slowly making her way across the floor to pick up her phone and call the police. I watched as a few of the jurors glanced to the back of the courtroom where my client sat in the dock, alone. The jury knew why he was sitting there without a co-defendant by his side, because the prosecutor had just told them. His sister and co-accused, Daniella, had already pleaded guilty to the charge of domestic burglary. She had admitted it and, in doing so, had admitted that the prosecution’s case was true. When the jury heard this I had watched a shadow pass over their faces and known what they were thinking: if one of them has already admitted it how can the other possibly deny it? I knew this because, up until that morning, I had thought the same.

  Bournemouth Crown Court is a large, long building with a lot of glass, slightly resembling a provincial airport. It was built within the unlikely triangle of a golf course, a regional hotel and a hospital, although the route to the court building, along bouncy tarmac with a row of mini-roundabouts, feels more like the entrance to a retail park. The cost of taking a train and taxi to this court is often equivalent to a hearing fee and so, enticed by the unusual privilege of a free car park, I usually drive instead. The six-hour round trip from London takes longer than the train, but I compensate for the loss of preparation time while on a motorway by rehearsing cross-examination and closing speeches out loud to the passing cars, scrawling corrections in my notebook in traffic jams and at red lights.

  Four months before Raymond’s trial began I was standing in Bournemouth Crown Court’s robing room looking out of the window. It was mid-autumn. An Indian summer had stretched on long after the leaves had begun to fall and the weather was warm. The sky was mottled with clouds, puffy white against the blue, like a baby’s mobile. On the table in front of me was the slim bundle of papers for Raymond’s plea and case management hearing in court that morning.2 On top of them was the document I had prepared for the court setting out Raymond’s defence, even though I doubted that the matter would ever get as far as a trial. The evidence against him was so strong that Raymond clearly had to plead guilty, I thought as I walked over to the mirror by the robing-room bathroom and took off my suit jacket. The courthouse heating appeared to be controlled by month rather than temperature and the robing room, busy with barristers getting ready for their cases, felt stale and close despite its size. Breaching unspoken protocol, I had worn a trouser rather than a skirt suit so that I did not have to suffer the heat of tights. My fitted T-shirt meant that the starched white collarette I wore in court fitted far better than had I worn a shirt, but the act of undressing in front of everyone – of taking off my jacket to fix the bib into place – always felt exposing. I shot a look in the mirror at the collection of barristers, all men, strewn around the room and I wondered if any would watch as my arms reached upwards to fasten the Velcro at the back of my neck or, worse, whether any – as had happened one unbearable morning – would go so far as to offer unwanted help. I willed them to ignore me and made the motion as quick as I could before my jacket and gown restored my equality.

  I had given Raymond and Daniella’s case little thought that morning. I was due to appear in two other matters, all listed at the same time, all in different courts. As soon as I arrived I tried to find the clerk in each of the three courts – to beg leniency and to persuade them to check that I had finished in one case before they called the other on. One of the hearings was straightforward: a bail application by the defence, which I was prosecuting. I had already collected the papers from the Crown Prosecution’s room on the way up to the robing room that morning and reasoned that, at least from what I had seen, the defence’s application was a hopeless one. The defend
ant was a drug dealer. A week after his release from prison he was found on his usual corner by the police, who promptly chased him down the road. As he ran, small wraps of crack cocaine fell from his trouser leg in a narcotic paper-trail, but when he was caught the defendant improbably claimed he knew nothing of them. He said that the three pairs of underwear he was wearing were not, as the police suggested, to hide his drugs, but were in fact protection against the possibility of being kicked in the balls. My other case involved the defence of a client equally committed to his innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence against him. A middle-aged businessman accused of a complicated fraud, he was, I knew, determined to fight it all the way to trial. Like others I have represented charged with similar offences, he was difficult to deal with. Convinced of his superior intellect, it was clear he was sure he could outwit the court as he thought he had outwitted the police. He would slip and slide around my challenges with convoluted explanations and a smug confidence designed to deflect. It was an exhausting process and meant I would struggle to have enough time with Raymond. But, I reasoned, Raymond’s was a straightforward burglary – a young guy and his sister, both with criminal records, up against a disabled middle-aged lady. They had no alibi for the afternoon. My client had been interviewed twice: once at home and afterwards at the police station, whereupon he changed his story – correcting his denial of ever going to Mandy’s flat once he knew his fingerprints had been found all over it. He must surely see that he should plead guilty, I thought; it would be madness not to. Usually I would have sought out my co-defending barrister – worked out what she was doing – but she had not yet signed in and I had no time to go to find her. I reasoned I would catch her just before we went into court and hoped she felt the same.

  I was trapped for most of the morning with my fraud client and so did not manage to meet Raymond until shortly before his hearing was due to start. He was sitting on one of the spongy blue chairs arranged along the corridor wall and raised his hand like a schoolboy in class when I called his name. I had not expected him to be so slight. His shoulders folded over into his chest and his legs were splayed at an awkward angle, as though his physicality was an inconvenience to him. He was, in truth, already barely visible. The sort of person easily missed, easily passed over. Had he knocked past you on the street, you would have been at a loss to describe him. Early twenties perhaps. Black-skinned, medium height, a slightly built boy with buzz-cut hair.