I took another step. Then stopped.
‘Are you Mr Winnock?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Were you just doing the adjudications?’
‘Yes,’ I repeated.
‘You’re wanted by Judge Meyer.’
I turned and was escorted backwards, back into the darkness of the prison, back through the gates which are locked and the doors which are bolted. I was escorted away from the blue sky, away from freedom, back onto the wing and back into the room where the adjudications were held.
District Judge Meyer sat at his desk. Scowling.
Bugger.
‘In that last case,’ he bellowed, ‘you engineered an adjournment to a date beyond the prisoner’s release date.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, with a quiet defiance.
‘You knew this?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I nodded.
‘That’s preposterous.’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s not up to me,’ I said, ‘I’m not allowed to act against the interests of my client.’
‘But you’re not allowed to mislead the court either.’
‘I didn’t mislead anyone,’ I said. ‘I was never asked – if someone had asked me when Neallie’s release date was, I’d have told them. I assumed that Officer Marsden would have been aware of it.’
Judge Meyer was now snorting with rage. ‘That’s bullshit and you know it.’
The word ‘bullshit’ made my eyes involuntarily widen, Judges never say ‘bullshit’, never – ‘Sorry,’ I said. But my apology was hollow. He knows it and I wanted him to know it.
‘I’ve a good mind to report you to the Bar Council, or to your Head of Chambers.’
I nodded, I feel quietly confident that my Head of Chambers would support me on this one – I was less sure about the Bar Council.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, ‘but I was never asked the question.’
District Judge Meyer chewed his lips, glared at me, then dismissed me.
I made my escape as quickly as I could. Breathing a great glug of air as I eventually emerged from the prison.
Had I acted properly? Well, probably not by the book. Should I have volunteered the information about Neallie’s release date? Possibly, I don’t know.
Nor do I know if District Judge Meyer ever contacted the authorities about the case of Ryan Neallie. Perhaps he did. Perhaps the incident was logged in the ‘big black book’ that some barristers are convinced is kept by the Lord Chancellor’s Office, in which is written all the things that each of us has done wrong, to be held in reckoning and considered again on that fateful day when someone, somewhere, is considering whether or not you should become a Judge. Perhaps, one day, a few crusty old High Court Judges, or whoever it is has access to such things, will open the big black book, blow away the dust, then run a hoary old finger down to the alphabetically listed names, until they reach Russell Winnock, upon which one of them will read through pince-nez spectacles: ‘Ah, yes, here we are, Winnock: he once failed to tell a District Judge about the release date of a prisoner and made him utter the phrase – bullshit.’
Hmm, unlikely, but who knows.
A chambers meeting
We don’t have many chambers meetings, thank god – they are almost always gloomy affairs. The meetings are arranged at short notice, and we are all instructed to attend. The agenda is usually dominated by some terrible event that, yet again, spells doom for us all.
So, when I got an email telling me that I had to attend a chambers meeting to discuss our response to the ‘Government’s proposed changes in the fee structures’, my heart sank.
And, judging by the funereal procession of barristers who traipsed into the chambers library two days later, I wasn’t alone in my pessimism about the hour or so that would follow.
My spirits weren’t lifted by the presence of all four of chambers’ Criminal Silks: Thomas Sadwell QC, Richard ‘Dicky’ Brindle QC, Yussef Lachmi QC and Timothy Belton QC.
QC, QC, QC and QC.
They were already perched in the library like four massive silverbacks, ready to pounce into action at the merest hint of an argument or discussion – because that is what QCs do best – they pontificate, argue, discuss and talk – a lot, and often about themselves. They have been awarded the title Queen’s Counsel because they do these things in a way that is intellectually superior to everyone else in the room, or their effortless confidence at least gives that impression.
QCs, and in particular Criminal QCs, are without doubt the masters of all they survey, they are the heavyweight boxers of the robing room, they strut and posture in court like muscle-bound sprinters before a 100m final. And if they’re the sprinters, then us juniors are the ones who dutifully hold the little box into which they place their discarded tracksuits as they strip down to their vests.
If all four of the Criminal Silks have turned up for a meeting then even by the standards of chambers meetings, things must be bad.
Thomas Sadwell, head of our chambers, opened the meeting.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said to the sea of unimpressed faces. ‘I wanted to gauge people’s reaction to the proposals by the Ministry for Justice to the change in our fees.’
‘It’s all bollocks,’ said Dicky Brindle, who is probably the biggest silverback of them all, and even managed to sound clever when uttering a response as crude as that.
‘Yes, thank you, Dicky,’ said Sadwell and continued, ‘The proposals are set out in the document that was emailed to each of you, which I hope you all received and read.’
There was a faint murmuring of assent at this, and I murmured along, though I have no idea if I received the email – and certainly haven’t read it.
‘In short, they’re proposing massive reductions to graduated fees and even greater reductions to Very High Cost Cases.’
‘What do you mean by “massive”?’ asked Lachmi.
‘About seventeen per cent,’ replied Head of Chambers, and there is a gasp.
See: gloom and despair. We knew it was coming, we knew that there would be further reductions to the criminal legal aid budget, we knew that it would be massive. What we don’t know is how to respond to these proposals. You see, barristers, who are trained to argue on people’s behalf, are absolutely rubbish at arguing in defence of themselves.
If we were teachers or nurses or railwaymen, the response to a seventeen per cent cut in our wages would be immediate – we would down tools, put on donkey jackets and man the pickets. But for us it’s a bit trickier. The older fellas, including the four Silks in the room, know that once upon a time the Bar did very well out of the legal aid scheme. There was a time when they could claim huge fees for not doing very much – and there is a certain amount of guilt knocking around about that; whilst the younger ones, such as myself, have only known these leaner times. We are the ones who entered the profession after the party had finished, who know nothing other than cuts to our fees and a diminishing amount of work – our mindset is that we are just pleased to be doing the job and that any money we get for it is a bonus.
I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me, for us, that is simply the way it is.
The mood of the meeting turned from despair to anger – my roommate, Jenny Catrell-Jones, was in uproar – ‘I’m not having it,’ she bellowed. ‘Why should we have our fees cut for doing a good job when bankers up the road in the City do a shit job, cripple the economy and get a huge bonus for their efforts? I spent ten hours preparing for a rape case last week – will I be paid for it? Will I hell. If a banker had to work for ten minutes for nothing he’d be bitching about buggering off to Frankfurt or Hong Kong.’
Jenny had now opened up the floodgates – the meeting descended into an exchange about how much work each of us has done for no money. As is often the case with barristers, it started to get competitive: with each story about how much work someone has done for no pay, someone else has to chip in with an even more impressive one – I half expect so
meone in a minute to suggest that they worked without sleep for an entire week and had to actually pay the Legal Aid Board for the privilege, which would probably prompt someone else to chip in with ‘That’s nothing, I gave a kidney last month – didn’t get a penny.’
But we are right to be angry – our ancient and revered profession is being slowly killed off by cuts to fees and changes to the ways in which we are able to conduct our work.
The uproar was brought to some semblance of order by another of our Silks, Tim Belton. ‘Okay, Tommy,’ he said to our Head of Chambers, ‘what is it proposed we do in response to these proposals?’
‘Well,’ said Thomas Sadwell, ‘the Criminal Bar Association is going to ballot all members over a proposed strike.’
‘Strike?’ exclaimed Belton.
‘Yes,’ said Sadwell, ‘a day of action.’
There was a silence as we all contemplated this – we knew that striking is not easy, that we were all bound by a code of conduct that says that we must appear in court and represent our clients’ best interests. We all knew that barristers had never taken industrial action, and that if we did, the right-wing press would have a field day calling us ‘fat cats’, and accusing us of feathering our nests as rapists and murderers went free. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it almost certainly wouldn’t succeed.
‘We can’t sit back and do nothing,’ said Jenny Catrell-Jones, ‘I propose that we as a chambers should support any action.’
‘I’m not sure that we can do that,’ said Lachmi, and the meeting now descended into an argument about the legality of collective action, which is another problem with assembling a room full of barristers – at some point they will all have an argument. Usually over some small legal technicality, which is wholly peripheral to the issue.
Twenty minutes later it was agreed that Gray’s Buildings Chambers were opposed to any further cuts to legal aid, and that individual barristers would come to individual decisions about whether to strike or not.
We traipsed out of the library. Around me, I picked up different desperate conversations from various learned colleagues – some were genuinely disturbed, talking about having to re-mortgage their houses or leave the Bar altogether, but for others, the problem was somewhat less acute, one moaned about his kids’ school fees, another wondered aloud about whether he could pay for a week skiing in Chamonix. I thanked all of our collective lucky stars that these conversations wouldn’t be overheard by a journalist from the Daily Mail.
My roommate, Angus Tollman, sidled up to me. ‘Will you go on strike then, Russ?’ he asked.
I shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I will. After all, we’ve got to do something, haven’t we?’
And I’m right about that. I know I am. Most people don’t ever want to have anything to do with the courts and the legal justice system – but, when they do, they want to be confident that the people representing them will be experienced, professional and skilled. Sadly, the way things are going, we will end up with a system where only those who can afford it will get experienced, professional and skilled barristers, whilst everyone else will have to take what they’re given and that could mean a kid just out of law school or someone who, sadly, just isn’t up to the job.
I hated the idea of striking, but, alas, as I plodded despondently out of the library and up to my desk, I realised my colleagues were right, we can’t just roll over and die, something had to be done, we have to try to save our profession.
R v Kenny McCloud
Clem Wilson called me into his room. I immediately felt a little frisson of nerves; especially when I saw that he was smiling at me – ‘I’ve just had Hayes, Finkelstein, Brewer on the phone,’ he said, referring to a firm of solicitors who’d recently given me a couple of briefs.
‘Okay,’ I said, nervously.
‘They’re very pleased with the cases you’ve done for them,’ he continued, and picked up a substantial bundle of papers wrapped in pink ribbon. ‘So they’ve sent you this.’
I took the brief from him as though accepting a birthday present. ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘thanks.’
‘One thing though.’
‘Sure, what?’ I sounded eager, because I was eager.
‘You have to have a conference with the client tomorrow morning, first thing at Pentonville Prison.’
‘Sure, no problem.’
I looked at the front cover, it said, R v Kenny McCloud.
Kenny McCloud. My first reading of that name.
It would be a significant case.
There is something great about getting a brand new, untouched brief. A brief with your name on. A brief that someone has looked at and decided you are just the right person to defend their client, look after his interests, perhaps win the case for him.
It felt great arriving home and putting the papers in the case of R v Kenny McCloud on my kitchen table. I looked at them for a few seconds, untouched and smooth, then decided to save them, like a child leaving his favourite sweet, until I’d had some tea. So I made dinner, then put on some music.
I often listen to music when I’m reading my briefs – and it can’t be any kind of music either, I mean Neil Young is god, but distorted guitar and anthemic folk rock isn’t conducive to concentration. I find anything from trance and trip-hop to Gregorian monks and sixteenth-century choral music best. I put on some Thomas Tallis and opened the brief of Kenny McCloud.
I started with the indictment, or charge sheet. Immediately I saw that this was by far the most serious case I had ever been given – there were sixteen counts, or charges. I read the first one: Rape. It told me that Kenny McCloud, on a date between the 16th October 1975 and the 15th October 1976, raped his daughter, Jessica McCloud, a girl aged six, by placing his penis inside her vagina, knowing or believing that she did not consent. It was the description of statutory rape of a child, chilling in its cold, clinical legal language.
The count of rape was followed by another nine similar counts against Jessica McCloud. Then there were another eight counts – this time the girl was called Karen McCloud, his other, older daughter, then aged eight.
They are what are called specimen counts, which means that they are just an example of what was going on regularly and for years.
I started to read the transcript of Jessica McCloud’s account:
‘I remember being six years old. I remember I was six because for my sixth birthday I had a puppy called Ralph and Ralph would be with us when my Dad did what he did.’
I looked at the indictment again, 1976. I pictured Top of the Pops, hairy men and girls with bell-bottom trousers and floral blouses. It seems cold in 1976. Cold and grey.
I continued to read. I was no longer just pleased to have received such a significant case, it is no longer about me and my career and my life as a barrister, it’s about the destruction of lives, it’s about tragedy and horror.
‘I first remember my Dad taking me and my sister for a walk, we used to go to a disused timber works that was near to the heath where we lived. It is not there anymore, it is where B&Q is now.
My Dad tied up my dog outside the works and made me and my sister go inside; I can’t remember what he said to make us go in, but we just followed him. We were in some kind of disused workshop, I remember there was glass on the floor and piles of old paper and sheets of wood. I then remember him grabbing me first and trying to kiss me. It wasn’t like a normal kiss, it wasn’t like a Dad kiss. I remember that his breath smelled. I didn’t know what to do. I was wearing a summer dress. He pulled it up and tried to get me to touch him, down below.
At this point my sister tried to hit him and he got angry. He took a metal dog chain and tied her up against a pole. He then tied me against another pole. He then …’
Here, there was a pause in the transcript and the interviewing police officer had to prompt Jessica McCloud, now a woman in her forties, by telling her in a gentle way that she was doing really well, and that it would soon be over. Jessica then carried on describing the worst
kind of abuse you could imagine – a campaign of violence and sexual assault. She described how her mother was an alcoholic and that she would ignore her and her sister when they told her that they didn’t want to go out on walks with Dad and how every time it would be the same, her and her sister, crying, sobbing, tied to a pole, hit with a dog chain and raped.
Her sister’s account was similar – she also recalled the smell of her father’s breath and the feel of the metal dog lead on her bare legs, already red with the cold of the outdoors. Karen seemed stronger. There were fewer pauses, less need for encouragement from the officer, her voice did not falter.
I read it all. I read the notes from the school teachers who remembered the girls complaining that they had welts on their back and how often they would come to school dirty. And the social workers who said that the records from that period had been destroyed, though one retired social worker could remember going to see the girls because they were worried that their mother was unable to cope, but concluded that no action needed to be taken. I read the report of Jessica McCloud’s psychiatrist who told of her depression and her inability to cope, which had led to a period of alcohol abuse.
I then read Kenny McCloud’s interview.
This was important, this was the first chance I had of discovering what my client said about these allegations. I wondered if he would accept his guilt. I doubted it; sex offenders rarely do. I was right – he denied everything. He claimed that he hadn’t seen either girl for twenty years and that they were probably after his money. ‘They’re probably just like their mother,’ he said, ‘drunken whores.’
It was after midnight by the time I finished reading every page of the brief. Every statement, every document, every word of Kenny McCloud’s stinking interview. I had devoured each page and found myself in a strange dark place. I am his barrister. I am his barrister. I had to prepare for the prospect of confronting his daughters with their ‘lies’ and putting forward my client’s case, when I knew that the accounts given by the women were absolutely and impeccably truthful. I knew that they had suffered.
Confessions of a Lawyer Page 9
