The Secret Barrister - Stories of the Law and How It's Broken

• 94% of cases tried in Magistrates’ Courts - max sentence possible to hand out is 2x 6-month prison sentences but proposals at time of writing the book to extend to 2x 1 year sentences (one per offense)
• No real training needed for magistrates - emphasis on community work
• Advisor provided to magistrates but not obliged to follow that advise
• ~6% of judges identify as BAME
• sentences found to be harsher for Asian, Chinese and Black than white
• sentences found to be harsher (1) on “sleepy Monday”, the first Monday back after switch to daylight savings, (2) before lunch and when the university’s home team lost in sport (was it football?)
• Proposal for a unified criminal code
  • exists in Canada
• legislation.gov.uk said to be very out of date
  • work by British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILLI) to make the law available and interpretable
    • still lags far behind commercial offerings
• Notable cases:
  • Kyle - sent down for 9 weeks in Magistrates’ Court after extensive pleading by “Mags”, his mum and the barristers to get Kyle to accept
  • Jay - accused of sexual assault on his daughters during their childhood and adolescence and found Not Guilty; after reading of verdict “George”, Senior Barrister in that case, turns to The Secret Barrister and says “He did it didn’t he…”
    • Secret Barrister provided as Junior hand on the case due to the volume of files provided by prosecution
• Legal aid provided only for those below household income of £37k (mentioned in hypothetical case of 32-year-old doctor in closing chapter or “Closing Speech”)
• Secret Barrister doesn’t favour an inquisitorial system of justice over an adversarial one since they do not trust the State with the task of fairly representing the defence for the accused and innocents
  • this argument seemed weak to me - how well and fairly are proceedings managed and what is the spend on ensuring their fairness in e.g. France, Germany, Italy?
• statistic of spend on legal aid of 38 per capita bandied about is wildly inaccurate due to inclusion of VAT (directly returned to HM Treasury), comparison against only 8 countries (not the “rest of the world”) and non-analogy of other systems esp. the inquisitorial systems not needing such spend (in these, spend on court fees is much higher, due to the nature of those systems whereas this is comparatively low in the UK)
• burden of proof (burden falls on the complainant who brings the case) and standard of proof (“proof beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal cases c.f. “proof on balance of probability” in civil cases)
• Hanlon’s razor - Wikipedia: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

---

• question where does the spending on justice (and of MoJ) actually go?
  • how much is this? how much over time? how does it compare to e.g. education, health, DCMS