Felix | A long game

As I write Andy Murray has just won Wimbledon. On a golden afternoon with the nation glued to its collective sofa he has been roared home as a worthy champion, applauded in public by a wide cross-section of celebs who I had not realised were quite such tennising officianados. And what a difference a year makes. Last year Sue Barker was inflicting torture on the man before the nation's very sofas, asking crashingly obvious questions of a man who was barely able to contain his grief. If it had been a Crown Court '¨trial the judge would have stopped it as being oppressive.

Criminal justice lawyers were celebrating their own little victory too. Chris Grayling has admitted defeat in a significant first to allow an element of choice under the new scheme he is so keen on. A good first step. We shall take a leaf out of the Murray Manual and keep coming back so that we '¨too can defeat these iniquitous and catastrophic proposals.

If we really wanted to know if we were right or wrong, then a few helpful conversations at the odd summer gathering that involves non-lawyers has proved timely. When I explained to a consultant surgeon that the person in charge of organising representation in the Crown Court is likely to be Eddie Stobart, she thought I was joking. No - this was not a joke to cause a titter among the Pimms and lavender of a summer evening - this was the absolute truth. My friends - non-lawyers - could not believe it; and this from those in the NHS who have been on the receiving end of a lot of madness over time.

Binary view

Recently an ever more painful truth about the whole rum business of live, love and the law has surfaced. The great conceit of course is that this sort of thing will never happen to the innocent, and certainly not those who are sipping Pimms among the lavender to the sound of a jazz band. But lo, by all accounts, it is not just those who are guilty or who fall into the wrong crowd who feel the long arm of the law. Suddenly I have been helping explain procedure and options to a family through a friend where an unfortunate set of circumstances has led to one perspective being taken that is suggesting that a criminal offence of significant seriousness may have been committed. Suddenly the world is full of words like "defendant", "credit for a guilty plea", "imprisonment", "suspended sentence", "self-defence", "accident", and "drunk" and so on.

The people concerned, based on my understanding, need a good lawyer. They need a good brief. They need a solicitor who will leave no stone unturned. What they do not need is someone pushing the papers, thinking in a binary way, thinking of the most safe, least damage option, thinking that a lesser plea with a bit of luck might spare the chap from an immediate custodial sentence. Oh, and them a nice bit of profit.

This is the reality. Nobody is safe from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, from a misunderstanding, from a hazy recollection, from a mistake. Nobody is above the outrageous randomness of life. We all accept somehow that the roads are dangerous places and we have to take care - it could be us in that pile up on the motorway. And we know that if it is then the very best that is on offer will be provided - there will be fire crews cutting the roof off the car, there will be ambulances and trauma paramedics screaming to the scene with blue lights; we know that there may be a helicopter, that there will be a surgical trauma team on standby, that there will be very best emergency medical care available - the theatre team at three in the morning on a Saturday night - Christmas Day if that is the case.

Cheapest deal

So why don't we think that we might one day need the best trauma team around when it comes to the criminal law? Or will one day emergency services also be provided by Eddie Stobart because "Stobart Trauma Care" can do it cheapest? Is it an answer to say to the relatives, "Sorry he died, but we did the best we could in the price range available, but if you had gone private there was a chance your husband would still be alive"?

I don't wish upon anyone the randomness and the anxiety of being mixed up in the criminal justice system - not even as a witness. It is bewildering, protracted, uncertain, and terrifying. But it should at least be a place where the best that can be done will be done.

So, like Andy, we shall have to keep on fighting, keep on coming back from defeat and fighting another day. Maybe we are getting closer - with one little break of service - one glimmer of a chance of a victory. In a year's time who knows? But the one thing that must never be said against all of us, barristers, solicitors, those who have stopped to think and have decided that they care - the one thing that must never be said against us in the future is that we did not try. Game on.

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