Confessions of a Lawyer

by Russell Winnock

  And barristers like Jenny Catrell-Jones will continue to do their job properly and effectively by pointing out to a jury that, actually, on the evidence they’ve heard, they can’t be sure. Whilst a jury will continue to do its job properly and effectively if it determines every case on the facts.

  Rape is a particularly emotive crime. There is something profoundly awful, something brutal, about a person who violates another in this base way, but, whether we like it or not, the issue of consent is not always as clear-cut as we’d like it to be, and whilst those convicted of rape should always be harshly punished, we should resist the temptation to rush to convict someone just because another person accuses them of rape. Rape, like every crime, should be considered in a temperate and fair way.

  Jenny filled her mug with a bit more cheap fizzy wine and looked glumly into the middle distance. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I hate this bloody job.’ And I nodded, because I got that, most barristers get that feeling from time to time, when you realise that you are actually dealing with some of society’s horriblest people doing the most horrible things.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s have a proper drink in a proper glass at the Erskine.’

  Domestic violence and the case of Carl and Leanne Stafford

  All barristers hate domestic violence cases.

  Take the case of Carl Stafford. Apart from anything, it is memorable to me as it is one of the handful of cases in which I’ve been against my mate, Johnny Richardson.

  Johnny was on the side of righteousness as the prosecutor, and me, well, I was representing Carl Stafford, a total bastard who would help to crystallise the image I have in my head of those who are accused of violence against their partners.

  Carl was in his forties when I met him. He was a warehouse supervisor, overweight, and drunk most nights on supermarket lager.

  His wife was Leanne.

  Before the trial, Johnny had described Leanne to me: she was small, quiet, and had once been very pretty. The type of girl who had the best figure in the whole school, but now just looked defeated, controlled, scared and tired – tired of being scared, I suppose.

  Carl Stafford was neither scared nor controlled; he was loud and abrasive, the type of guy who insisted on being the centre of attention wherever he went. People knew him, but few knew him well. He wasn’t the type of bloke who went out with mates to the pub or to the football, he went to functions, he went to parties and gatherings. There seemed to be a lot of christenings and social events in the upstairs rooms of pubs, which Carl would insist on attending with Leanne. He would place her with the benign female friends he wasn’t threatened by, whilst he took his place by the bar giving everyone who had the misfortune of being anywhere near him the benefit of his opinion on whatever was being discussed. He would try to dominate everything and everybody.

  I have no doubt that his opinions were odious.

  At the end of these nights, he and Leanne would get a taxi home, and this is where the problems would start. This is when Carl’s inadequacies would race round his head chased by lager and self-loathing. He would remember the conversations he’d had, the reactions of his audience. Of how Mike, his sister’s bloke, hadn’t responded properly when he was giving some kind of anecdote; or how Brian, who worked with him, hadn’t laughed at a joke, and then he would remember that there had been a man wearing a denim jacket stood at the bar who may have been looking at Leanne. Fucking Leanne, she was the source of his problems, she was laughing at him too. She was laughing at him and flirting with the bloke in the denim jacket, he bloody well knew this, and his concerns about Mike and Brian and all the other men he was threatened by would dissipate and be replaced by his rage towards his wife, who had done nothing wrong.

  And that is when he would beat her.

  And beat her.

  And beat her.

  The police had been called a few times, but Leanne had never pressed charges; she had always believed him when he said that he would change, when he told her that he loved her, when he told her that without him she would be nothing.

  After a works quiz night at the Swallow’s Arms, he meted out a particularly savage beating. Leanne had run out of her house wearing only her underwear and had been helped by a neighbour who had tended to the cut under her eye and the bruises to her body, and telephoned the police.

  PC Simeonson had been outstanding. She had taken Leanne to her mother’s and had carefully written down a statement in which Leanne Stafford had outlined everything that had happened to her over fourteen years. A fourteen-page statement as vicious and as desperate as any novel or gritty TV drama, except this was Leanne Stafford’s real story, her real life.

  Stafford had been arrested, charged and bailed not to go anywhere near her. Predictably, because it was against every fibre of his being to relinquish control, he had breached the terms of his bail by turning up at her mum’s, pissed, and shouting an incoherent mix of how much he loved her and how she was a slag who had started it all. The police arrested him again and this time he was remanded into custody.

  And that is when I met him – in a cell, as a remand prisoner.

  His first words to me were ‘Why the fuck am I in here? This is a fucking disgrace. I’ve got my fucking rights.’

  I told him that he was in prison because he was accused of beating his wife with a dumbbell.

  ‘It’s all bollocks,’ he told me.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘what about her injuries? How can you account for them?’

  ‘I hardly fucking touched her,’ he said, unable to meet my gaze.

  The coward.

  In his mind it was all her fault. In his mind she had driven him to it. I listened to him tell me about what a great dad he was, how he was missing his kids, how hard he worked for his family and how he planned to take them all to Florida next summer, and with every word, he sounded increasingly pathetic.

  ‘You better get me bail,’ he told me, and I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I’ll do my best, but it’s not likely, not in a case like this.’

  The next week he pleaded not guilty to GBH; the Judge looked at me. ‘What is his defence, Mr Winnock?’

  ‘He never caused her any injury,’ I said.

  ‘Well who did?’ asked the Judge.

  ‘Not him,’ I answered. And I hated that Carl Stafford would have enjoyed the spectacle of my nonchalance in the face of the Judge’s questions.

  Later, in the cells, Carl Stafford told me that she wouldn’t turn up for the trial. ‘I know for a fact,’ he said, ‘she won’t turn up.’ Guilty men know a lot of things for a fact.

  I nodded and warned him that the police would bring her to court.

  He was right. At the first trial, Leanne Stafford didn’t turn up.

  Johnny had applied for an adjournment and the Judge had tutted. ‘Is there any prospect of this lady turning up next time?’ he asked.

  And Johnny had assured him that there was. And Carl Stafford had smirked – because he knew better.

  But at the next trial, Leanne did turn up.

  Johnny had told me gleefully that she was in the witness care suite, reading through her statement.

  I went to see Stafford.

  ‘Your wife is here,’ I told him.

  And he looked at me, his face an ugly scowl, incredulous, disbelieving.

  ‘It means you have to decide if you want to run this to trial.’ I told him, ‘And if we’re having a trial you have to give me some instructions as to how she came about her injuries.’

  ‘I never hit her with a dumbbell,’ he said, ‘I might have slapped her, but she kept goading me.’ He paused. ‘She ripped my clothes up once,’ he said, as though this justified everything. ‘She probably did most of the injuries to herself, to make things worse.’

  Now it was my turn to scowl at him.

  ‘You do realise,’ I said, ‘that if you have a trial, I will have to cross-examine your wife, and I will have to put it to her that she’s lying and that she caused some of her in
juries herself? You understand that don’t you?’

  He nodded.

  And that’s what I would do, I would put my wig on my head and my cape around my shoulders and I would put my client’s case to the witness, just as I am trained to do. He was a coward and a bastard and I was an accessory. I took solace in the fact that it was a rubbish defence that was bound to fail and that Carl Stafford would end up serving even more time in prison. Should I confess this? Probably not, but it’s true, and if a barrister tells you that there has never been a time when he wanted his client to lose, then he’s probably not being truthful.

  Johnny opened the case to the jury, who listened, probably grimacing inwardly at the thought of the bloated thug in the dock beating up his wife of fourteen years.

  Johnny turned to the Judge. ‘I call the first witness for the Crown, Your Honour, Leanne Stafford.’

  But Leanne Stafford didn’t appear through the door of the court. Instead an usher rushed in and whispered something in Johnny’s ear. I knew exactly what was happening. It was all depressingly predictable. Johnny told me later that Leanne had been left in the witness care room, shaking with fear, crying at the worthlessness of her existence, and decided that she couldn’t give evidence. She had asked to go to the toilet and run away.

  The Judge wouldn’t allow Johnny another chance. ‘I’m afraid, Mr Richardson,’ he said, ‘that enough taxpayers’ money has been wasted on this already, you’ve had your chance.’

  Taxpayers’ money. He couldn’t have put it in a more callous way.

  Twenty minutes later Carl Stafford was released. I didn’t stick around to shake his hand. I hated him and felt no pride in securing an acquittal for my client.

  Bradley Edwards and the ‘Furry Fuckers’

  A common fear amongst barristers who are dependent upon legal aid money is that we will become stuck in a sort of timeless career which is difficult to get out of. It is harder to become a Judge, which is one traditional way out; harder to retire, because our pensions, if we have one, are worth very little; and pointless becoming a QC, because there’s not much money in that either. I’m not moaning, but it’s a fact that the Criminal Bar will probably shrink as fewer and fewer people become barristers, and as such we fear that eventually there will be a small rump of ageing men and women who cling to their wigs and gowns, customs and traditions and occasionally get wheeled out in front of a court to present some case or other.

  Bradley Edwards is a sort of ghost of the future, who haunts various courts around London, showing us what might come to pass.

  Bradley is extremely old. Estimates have him at 84 years old, though there is a fair bit of speculation that he could even be a couple of years older than that. Legend has it that once upon a time, Bradley was a fine advocate, a great lawyer who was destined for the highest position. But, sadly, he was passed over for both the Judicial bench and Queen’s Counsel. My old pupil-master Ronnie Sherman suggested that he been caught messing around with the wife of the Master of the Rolls at a Lincoln’s Inn dinner back in the 1960s, but other stories of whatever misdemeanour befell Bradley range from a predilection for schoolboys to a rather public brush with Communism at Cambridge in the 1950s. For whatever reason though, Bradley Edwards never really progressed, but nor has he ever retired, instead he stalks the corridors of the Bailey and other courts, clutching the odd rather limited brief to represent some minor felon or other.

  I first met him in the flesh during my first ever appearance at the Old Bailey. I was due to mitigate in a sentence in a case where a man had deliberately knocked someone off his bike by London Bridge.

  I was young and nervous, awed by my surroundings, and at first paid little attention to the Counsel, who had quietly sidled in by my side.

  Then, when that Counsel started to make strange wheezing noises I looked to my left and saw Bradley Edwards. I knew it must be him, I’d already heard the stories. He sat with his mouth open and his eyes fixed in the middle distance, as some other barrister in another case made submissions to the Judge. He smelled of something rotten, as though one of his body parts had died and had yet to inform the rest of him. His wig was a strange shade of nicotine yellow and his gown was coated in a grey crusty ash-type substance, the source of which was a mystery.

  After a few minutes listening to what was going on, or appearing to, he turned to me – ‘Have the Furry Fuckers been in yet?’ His voice boomed over the hapless brief, who was on his feet, and caused the Judge to stop and look in his direction.

  Bradley Edwards didn’t give a monkey’s about this though. At the age of 80 whatever, he was far beyond any judicial admonishment and would speak as loud as he thought he had to, regardless of whether he was in court or not.

  ‘Sorry?’ I whispered.

  ‘The Furry Fuckers,’ he repeated, ‘have they arrived yet?’

  I shrugged. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. He looked at me with a degree of concern.

  ‘Is this your first time at the Bailey?’

  I nodded, moving uncomfortably in my seat as I did, in a vain attempt to try to distance myself from anything that might possibly irritate the Judge.

  At this point Bradley rather loudly cleared his throat, rearranging 84 years of phlegm and the dust of a thousand visits to the Old Bailey from his chest to his larynx.

  ‘I can’t believe no one’s warned you about the Furry Fuckers,’ he continued, to my excruciating embarrassment. ‘You see any minute now, there’ll be a knock on that door to the Judge’s left, and when it’s opened you’ll see an old man in a fur coat and hat, bowing like a fucking imbecile at the court.’

  I wanted the ground to swallow me up there and then, I wanted to shout out across the courtroom, ‘I’m not with this decrepit old fart, he’s nothing to do with me.’ But, of course, I couldn’t.

  ‘They’re the Aldermen of the City,’ continued Edwards, ‘and in order to get a free lunch, they have to earn it. Now we can’t let them anywhere near the courts, so we pretend by making them dress up in their furry best and nod at us. That’s why they’re the Furry Fuckers, they always bloody turn up when you least want them to.’

  I thought he was mad.

  I thought he was mad right up until the moment when there was a knock on the door and the court rose as one to acknowledge the man in the fur coat and hat.

  ‘See,’ said Edwards, ‘I told you.’

  He was absolutely right. He stayed by my side for the rest of the morning, I wasn’t sure if he actually had a case or was just wandering around for something to do. He listened to the prosecutor opening the case against my client, and then leaned towards me. ‘If I were you,’ he said, trying his hardest, but failing miserably, to whisper, ‘in front of this Judge, I’d tell him about your client’s excellent work record.’

  On a whim, I decided to do just that. I changed my initial speech in mitigation and told the Judge about the fact that my client after years of being homeless and unemployed had now obtained work, and was doing well.

  It worked. My client was given a suspended sentence and left the court a very happy man.

  By the time I had finished, though, Bradley had already got up, coughed a bit, swore audibly about something and waddled out of the courtroom.

  You don’t see him too much now. Perhaps he’s still wandering the corridors of some Crown Court or other, clutching a flimsy brief in his hand and passing on the lessons from his years of experience to some other young barrister, fresh from law school. I hope so.

  The story of Charlie Parkman QC

  I had only spoken to Charlie Parkman twice in my ten years in chambers, once at a chambers drinks do to commemorate the appointment of Tim Belton to Silk and another time when I happened across him in the chambers kitchen making coffee. I think on the first occasion he made a few polite comments about chambers doing very well; and on the second, he mentioned how he was resisting the urge to have a chocolate HobNob, because he was putting weight on, which precipitated a brief conversation a
bout the merits of HobNobs as opposed to Gingers or Chocolate Digestives.

  He wasn’t one of those barristers who immediately demanded attention when he entered a room.

  There were stories about him and not all of them were good.

  As soon as I’d been given permission to instruct leading Counsel, I arranged for us to meet in chambers library.

  I was nervous. I sent him copies of all the papers in the case together with my typed-up notes from the conference with Tasha and some of my own thoughts about tactics for the trial.

  Before our scheduled meeting, I ventured into the chambers common room, which is a sort of communal area, ostensibly for barristers to meet and have a chat, though in reality it has become a dumping ground for old briefs and out-of-date law books.

  To my surprise, sitting there quietly reading the newspaper was Edward Grieve. Eddie Grieve is our most senior Chancery and Civil barrister. Rumour has it that he is the top earner in chambers and has refused to take Silk or a judicial appointment because he’s earning more as a junior barrister. He’s also a very nice guy, the type of bloke who overflows with helpful wisdom.

  He looked up when I entered the room and greeted me warmly.

  ‘Ah, young Mr Winnock,’ he said, ‘what are you up to?’