Felix | The truth will out

We like to say that we can always spot our clients at court. You turn up on a busy morning full of plea and case management hearings (PCMHS), pre-trial reviews (PTRs) and other things which are known by their acronyms: POCA, RIPA, SOPO, PII, OTT, AWOL, WTF (I’ve made some of these up, by the way). And your client is facing some sexual allegations to do with children, and you do not know his name, but the funny thing is he is often quite easy to spot before you ask if Mr So-and-So is here.

We can spot these sorts of clients a mile off. Often this factor is one that preys heavily on the mind when defending, because we can’t help but wonder if the jury are going to reach that same unfortunate conclusion for themselves. Giveaways seem to include: homemade tattoos, bad teeth, bad dress-sense, prolific dandruff, riding a moped, access to a church or school boiler room, an interest in certain websites, and a penchant for all or any of the following: guns, country and western music, bondage, photography, military history, Nazi Germany and so on.

Knight in shiny tracksuit

Now on the other hand we have the revelations that Jimmy Savile was not quite such the knight in a shiny tracksuit that everyone thought he was. It seems that there were those in the know, and perhaps his secrets were not all that secret. It was not so easy to spot with Savile, and of course nobody, it seems, wanted to know. Being a national treasure means that you can get away with a lot, obviously. And being a national treasure back in the good old seventies meant that there was a lot that you could get away with, because a lot of people didn’t think there was much wrong with what you were up to. After all, these were deeply sexist times, when being a good sport in the office as a girl meant putting up with being groped, goosed and jumped on at the office party. Let’s face it, barristers’ chambers were not exactly islands of respectability either. For all those offices where the girls were warned who to watch out for, the same warnings were given ?in certain sets of chambers as well.

Now however we have had a week where it has proved that whoever you are, Jimmy Savile or Lance Armstrong, however far you can run in Savile’s case, or ride in Armstrong’s case, you can’t in the end, hide. Someone, somewhere, will blow the whistle. There are few dictators who have in the end gone to their deaths with the aid of easeful sleep and no sense of an uneasy head that wears the crown – most have had their chips in the end, whether hiding in a drain or a hole, hanging from a lamppost or committing suicide in a bunker, or even ending up in a court at the Hague. Stalin managed it, Franco managed it, but most do not.

So We should applaud the brave whistleblowers and the ones with the guts to speak up and say that the person everyone thinks is a saint or a super star is in fact a monster

Easy to spot

By a strange juxtaposition this week sees the Bar finalise its responses on QASA – no, not a night club, an exciting form or a paintball but with lasers, or indeed a form of salty snack or nitrogen-loaded cocktail. This is the way that judges are to assess whether we are any good or not at our job. Now this is a disaster, because we will be doing two things in the context of a trial – we are representing our client and we are representing ourselves. We are supposed to be representing our clients fearlessly, without worrying about how we look or whether we upset the apple cart. Sometimes we need to take the judge on. Sometimes, in order to finesse the law on a certain point we need to take a novel point that is met with irritation by the judge. Much successful case law began with a judge refusing the merits of the argument – otherwise it would not have got to the Court of Appeal in the first place. Along ?the way the judge may have thought the point ludicrous and may have said so. Are we to back off, because the judge is irritated and so we will get marked down? Isn’t the better way to be assessed by CPD and courses and only if there is a clearly negligent piece of advocacy, find that the judge has intervened?

In the end, like the sex offender hanging around outside court, most bad advocates are easy to spot. There is not a need for judges to assess all of us. We can take our points, good, bad or debateable and not be worried that they mis-chime with his Honour’s blood sugar levels. Given that we do not enjoy the status of national treasures or global sporting super stars the public need not fear that with the Bar it is going to require a whistleblower to tell the world that things aren’t what they seem. And even if we did, this week’s events show that eventually we will all get exposed for who we are, and get what we deserve.