Here I Stand

by Amnesty International UK

  He wasn’t intimidated by the courtroom, the press gallery or the judge. When the defence counsel accused him of being a liar, he looked her right in the eye and said, “Of course I’m a liar. I’m a teenager. I tell lies every day to get me out of trouble or detention or to rent an 18 game. But I’m not lying about this. Every word I’ve said here today is true. Every single one. You can twist them; you can call me names; you can choose to believe me or not. It’s up to you. But I’m telling the truth.”

  When he talked about his little brother, I knew that we were going to get a conviction. “Edward is really annoying most of the time,” he said. “He comes into my room without knocking. He steals my Xbox. He jumps on top of me on a Saturday morning when I’m trying to sleep. He drives me nuts. But that night, when I saw Mark looking at him the way he had looked at me when he first moved in, I knew I had to say something. Now that it’s come out, all the lads in my year are calling me gay. They can call me whatever they want: I don’t care. So can you. But this is what happened. And it will happen to Edward too if you don’t stop him.”

  Moments like this make my job worthwhile. My mates ask me, how can I do it? Does it not affect me? And of course it does. Sometimes when I go down the pub after a case has gone badly, it’s all I can do not to scream out loud in frustration. But when Damien stood tall in the witness box and didn’t flinch as he recounted every detail, I looked across at Dr Richardson, saw the complete lack of emotion on his face and knew that I was doing something worthwhile. The man just didn’t care. Unlike that teacher we caught last year who blamed it all on the girls in his class. That guy broke down and cried like a baby when they sentenced him and I felt even more disgusted by him than I had before.

  Anyway, the case is closed. And it’s an early night for me. But I won’t forget Damien in a hurry. That boy is going to do something important with his life: I can just tell.

  What am I talking about? He already has.

  DULCE ET DECORUM EST

  Chibundu Onuzo

  “Good morning, Matthew. I’m Derebo Pepple and I’ll be representing you in court.”

  “No disrespect, miss, but aren’t you a bit young? I want a real lawyer, fam. Man ain’t going to prison cos of no rookie.”

  I stared through the glass at the juvenile delinquent – black, of course, as most of the young men I represent are. The statistics do not lie. These brown males, whether bearded or shaven, dreadlocked or clean cut, tattooed or unblemished, are more likely to end up in prison than their white counterparts. In law school I thought these were the cases I would gain most satisfaction from. I, Derebo Pepple, would prise my clients from the jaws of a criminal justice system trained to snap shut on dark ankles, to hold fast and never let go.

  “Right,” I said. I opened up Matthew Adebọwale’s file. “Let’s get started before we’re called up.”

  “Derebo? Are you, like, African?”

  “I’m Nigerian,” I said.

  “Me too. I’m British, yeah, but I identify with my roots. Adebọwale is a Yoruba name. It means ‘the crown has entered’. So I’m, like, a prince. That’s what they call me in the south east: Prince.”

  “You’ve been charged with aggravated burglary. That means burglary committed with firearms.”

  “Lies, man.”

  “If you decide to plead not guilty, you will need a convincing explanation for why you and three other men were parked outside a house in Lewisham that had just been burgled, with two guns between the four of you.”

  “I don’t know about no guns or no burglary. They’re my mates, yeah. I just got in the car ten minutes before the police stopped us. They were giving me a lift home.”

  “Plausible enough, but I must warn you that the other men involved might try to give a similar explanation.”

  “Why is it me you don’t believe? Fuck this.”

  My client was thickset, built like a man but with round cheeks and a hairless chin spotted with blackheads. He was only fourteen. No previous convictions but a warning for antisocial behaviour. I stared at him as my mother had stared at me countless times, eyelids rigid, corneas drying, a look that could still arrest me in my tracks at thirty.

  “I do not appreciate your language,” I said, finally.

  “I’m sorry, miss.”

  “As I was saying, you’re a minor with a reasonably clean record. The judge is very likely to be lenient. The victim has already stated that there were four men. Four balaclavas were found in the car. The victim’s diamond engagement ring was in the glove compartment.”

  “I don’t know what everyone else is going to say,” he said, looking down.

  I had seen this unswerving loyalty to the gang before: out of fear or love or the sheer bloody-mindedness of teenage boys. They run in packs, with hierarchies and structures that show a perverse love of order, a shadow army of adolescents running amuck on the streets of London.

  “This isn’t about anyone but you, Matthew. The others in the car were over eighteen. They’re adults, facing adult prison, and they’re not my clients. You need to finish school and get your GCSEs and move on with your life.”

  The warder rapped on the door to signal that it was time. This would be Matthew’s first appearance at the magistrate’s court. He would be formally charged and the case transferred to the Crown Court, which dealt with more serious crimes.

  We met in the hallway. His growth spurt must have been recent. He was ungainly in his movements, like a foal testing out its legs. He smiled shyly at me.

  “Here we go, miss.”

  We walked into the courtroom. Dark wood panelling ran up the walls, solid, patrician beams that gleamed with decades of polish. A coat of arms, etched in gold leaf, hung above the magistrate’s head: lion rampant, unicorn rearing, motto in a dead language that a privileged few could understand.

  “That’s my mum,” he whispered to me.

  Matthew’s mother was seated in the front row. Her hair was hidden under a scarf so tatty it might as well have been a hairnet. Her body was middle-aged – bulging stomach, hefty arms, neck as thick as a tyre – but her face was still beautiful, all smooth angles and straight planes. She waved at her son and he waved back. There was no one beside her.

  Matthew’s alleged accomplices were also in court, dressed in identikit Nike trainers, sagging jeans and oversized jumpers. It was the first time they had seen Matthew since their arrest. They flashed him a hand signal: thumb and index finger pressed together, the remaining digits raised stiff and straight. Matthew returned the salute.

  The magistrate, Quentin Fowler, was an experienced hand. I had stood many times before him with his head of thick silver hair, centre parted and combed in sweeping eaves to his ears. He spoke in a clear Etonian accent that matched his Old Etonian striped tie. The charge was read out and a date fixed for the first Crown Court hearing. My bail application was denied on the grounds that Matthew’s home address was unsuitable.

  “In the light of Mr Adebọwale’s possible involvement with gangs in the area, it would be unwise to permit a return to his home,” Quentin concluded.

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t get bail,” I said to Matthew as the warder came to take him back to prison.

  “Not your fault, miss. My mum don’t know anybody outside my postcode and if I go home, I might get in trouble.”

  “Let’s be positive. Think about what I said. The best thing to do is tell the truth. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Thanks, miss.”

  I wanted Matthew to get as light a sentence as possible. It was the first verdict I had cared about in months. It still surprised me how much I disliked the majority of my clients. When they had been dark brown statistics read out of textbooks, I had raged at the injustice of their incarceration, the harshness of their sentencing, the institutional bias that rose like bile when a judge saw a black man in the dock.

  But once these statistics were transformed into flesh-and-blood criminals who stabbed and raped and stole, I discovered how s
hallow my empathy was. In recent years, I had become as much a profiler as the Metropolitan Police. The sight of a group of black teenagers was enough to alter my behaviour as I travelled around the capital. I changed carriage; I crossed the street; I never sat upstairs on the bus.

  Still, I liked Matthew. He had called me miss.

  I caught the 91 to my Islington home, where I knew my husband would be waiting. Ladi was a second-generation Nigerian, UCL graduate and one of the youngest consultant gynaecologists at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital. His father was dead, his mother a cleaner and he had grown up on a council estate famous for gang violence. I had been attracted to the determination that encompassed his studies, his career and me. It had been flattering to be so single-mindedly wanted by someone who had never taken no for an answer. I was what Ladi Ogusanwo wanted and I was what he got.

  “I’m home,” I announced as I walked into the hallway.

  “Was it a murder?”

  “Not yet. Still hoping.”

  We kissed – a sterile, dry-lipped peck – before he hurried back to the kitchen. Ladi rarely let me cook. He associated Nigerian food with the cramped council flat he had grown up in, food that left smells in your hair and your clothes and on your breath, announcing your African origins to the world.

  “What are we having tonight?” I asked.

  “Tranche of turbot with bearnaise sauce.”

  Ladi knew which vegetables should go with which cut of lamb, which fish went with which sauce, which wines were fruity and which were dry, which parts of a scallop should be eaten and which should be thrown in the bin.

  “So, how was your day?” Ladi asked, as we sat opposite each other at our empty dining table. He was not a handsome man – his face was too square and his eyes too closely set together – but many of the other girls at our university had wanted him. He was so obviously “going somewhere” with his life.

  “It was fine,” I said. “I’m representing a fourteen-year-old charged with aggravated assault. It’s scary when they’re that young. I don’t want to mess up anybody’s life because I gave a poor defence.”

  “You’re not the one who’ll mess up his life. He messed up by running with the wrong crowd,” Ladi stated as he spooned some buttered potatoes onto his plate.

  “You’re too hard,” I said.

  “And you’re too soft. I grew up with boys like this. While I was washing cars for a bit of extra change, they were selling drugs, walking around like they owned the place. And now, half of them are probably in jail, still walking around like they own the place.”

  There was an unattractive smugness that surfaced any time my husband and I spoke of my clients. Usually at this point, I would change topic. But Matthew’s face as I had last seen it, eyes puffy with unshed tears, rose before me.

  “Even though your mum was a single parent, she pushed you. She was very strict,” I reminded him.

  “You think these boys didn’t have strict mums? Strict teachers, strict uncles, everybody telling them the right thing to do? They did, but they wouldn’t listen. People have to learn to be responsible for their actions. They decided to sign up to a foolish postcode war. Child soldiers in Hackney threatening everyone with knives. They made their choices and I made mine.”

  “They’re not soldiers. They’re teenage boys. Easily influenced. Easily led astray.”

  “Poor little drug dealers. You can’t understand, Debs. It’s all too far from your childhood, innit?”

  I hated this pointed use of slang he had long erased from his speech. He placed his hand on mine but I withdrew it. It had seemed an affectionate running joke at first, my bourgeois Nigerian childhood compared with his school-of-hard-knocks life in east London. I don’t know how I missed the resentment that underlay the teasing.

  Yet I knew how he loved to tell his colleagues that his father-in-law was a big man in Africa. That his wife had gone to Roedean to do her A-levels, a finishing school for an African princess. Would he have married me if I hadn’t fitted into his ideas of advancement? I had met his childhood sweetheart once, a woman in her thirties who still wore gel in her hair, the loose strands slicked to her forehead in sickening, glistening curls.

  I stacked the crockery and took it to the kitchen: two serving bowls, two dinner plates, two side dishes and a pair of silver tongs, laid out for two people. Ladi did not think we could afford children yet. Private school was expensive.

  I slid on yellow rubber washing-up gloves. Matthew would be in his cell now, alone for the first time in his life. His mother would be awake, somewhere in south-east London, wondering where she had gone wrong with her son.

  “I’m sorry,” Ladi said from the doorway of our kitchen. “I might have let things get a bit heated.” He slipped his hands around my waist and pressed himself against my back. I wondered when I should tell him that I had come off the pill and was three months pregnant.

  Matthew’s plea hearing was two weeks away, and while he waited in the detention centre there was a sudden surge of violence through the capital. A sixteen-year-old boy was stabbed outside a JD Sports store in Oxford Street while a crowd of shoppers and tourists looked on, filming with their slim handheld smartphones. With his death, an invasion of yobs was launched, flowing up the tube escalators and spilling out into the streets of central London, staging their battles in once sacrosanct public spaces. The Royal Albert Hall, the National Theatre and the Barbican became the sites of conflicts that news commentators now scrambled to understand. North west versus south east. Kill City Massive vs Brick Lane Bloods. The barbarians were at the gates and no one could speak their language.

  I was glad Matthew had not been granted bail. Had he been let out, he would most likely have been part of the uprising. When I next saw him, on the day of the trial, he was animated.

  “Morning, miss.”

  “Morning, Matthew. Glad to see you looking so cheerful. You don’t have to call me miss, you know. Derebo is fine.”

  “But you’re old, miss. Not old like ancient, but I reckon you’re the same age as my mum. She’s thirty-two. She had me when she was bare young.”

  “So, have you decided what you’ll be pleading today?”

  “I spoke to my youth worker and my mum came in as well. I’ve decided to tell the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “I was there for the burglary. But, like, I didn’t even do nothing. I just stood by the door looking out, but yeah, I was there. I don’t know nothing about no guns though. I just turned up and the guns were there. I’m fourteen, man. This ain’t America. Where am I going to get a gun?”

  “Thank you, Matthew. I will write a statement with what you’ve just said, and if you read it over and agree, we’ll both sign it. If you don’t understand anything, please ask me.”

  I drafted his confession.

  “I, Matthew Adebọwale, was present at the burglary on 25 July 2015. I had no prior knowledge of the guns used to carry out the robbery and affirm that they were not mine,” he read out. “What’s affirm, miss?”

  “Swear.”

  “My mum doesn’t like me to swear.”

  “It’s more like a promise. A deep promise.”

  We both signed the piece of paper and I slid it into his file.

  “So, what next?” he asked.

  “You wait to be called.”

  “What do you think I’ll get?”

  “With your confession I’m hoping no more than four years, and it’s likely you’ll only have to serve two of those.”

  “Can you do exams in prison? Like GCSEs and stuff? Cos I want to take my GCSEs.”

  “Yes, you can. What’s your favourite subject?” I asked him.

  “I like English. We had this book, Oliver Twist. Bare fat book, yeah. I didn’t read all of it. Went on SparkNotes cos that shit was too long. But I could relate to the story, you know. Like these poor young kids stealing cos, like, everybody got stuff but them. It hasn’t changed, has it, miss?”

  “No, it ha
sn’t.”

  The warder came and rapped on the door. It was time.

  “I’ll see you inside court, Matthew.”

  It was a triumph of sorts. Two years in juvenile prison would hopefully straighten Matthew out. It wasn’t like adult prison, where the state had mostly given up on you, leaving you to fester for the length of your sentence before returning you to a life of crime. I walked through the courts looking for Sarah Hall, the prosecuting lawyer. She was young, already making a name for herself, not with the number of cases she’d won but because of her thick Geordie accent, which she flatly refused to refine.

  “Sarah, I have a signed confession from my client,” I said, finding her by the water cooler.

  “This the aggravated burglary?”

  “Yes. He was there but he knew nothing about the guns. He’s only fourteen.”

  “Well, that’ll make my life a lot easier. The other three are pleading not guilty. Can you feckin’ believe it? They know absolutely nothing about a robbery. They all got into the car a few minutes before the police stopped them. Even the driver. Are you sure your client won’t change his mind?”

  “He can’t. He doesn’t know what the others are pleading. He hasn’t seen them since their first appearance in court.”

  “Well, if I were you, I’d keep it that way. I’ll see you inside.”

  My case was due to be heard in ten minutes. I didn’t have enough time to eat the sandwich Ladi had prepared for me: venison, horseradish mayonnaise and rocket plucked from his windowsill garden that morning. The rocket would be wilted by the time the hearing was over. Another reason to bin the sandwich and go to KFC.

  I stood by the court entrance with the other defence barristers waiting for our clients to arrive. Left to right: Priscilla Darlington (Benenden and Oxford), Claudius Coleridge (Harrow and Cambridge), Anish Thakur (St Paul’s and Oxford) and me. We were dressed in our identikit uniforms, formless black robes, white starched cravats and ridiculous horsehair wigs that still made me feel like I was in a pantomime.