‘We all undergo very specialised training in dealing firmly, yet fairly, with those who are suspected of theft.’
‘So you’d never assault anyone?’
‘No, certainly not.’
‘You’d never attempt to injure anyone?’
‘No.’
He had now cottoned on to where I was going with this line of questioning. So have some of the jury. As I said, it’s theatre and they’re desperate for more, they want to know what will happen next, they want to get as close to the action as they can.
‘I’d like you to look at this then please.’
I pushed the button on the video remote control and the images of Shandra Whithurst being approached by Mr Horton and his mate appeared. I stopped the tape. ‘That’s you there, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yes, it could be.’ There he was again – evasive – of course it’s bloody him!
‘Could be, Mr Horton? Well it is, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
At this point Judge Smithson got involved. ‘What do you mean, you think so? Is it or is it not you?’
‘It is, yes.’
I gave the jury a quick look of exasperation. Just a little one, nothing too much, but enough to let them know that I shared their irritation at the witness’s wriggling – a look to suggest to them that we were in this together.
‘Thank you, Mr Horton.’ I spoke clearly, as polite as a Boy Scout.
I now played the next bit of the video, the bit that showed Miss Whithurst put her hands in the air, then move away from the security guards as they tried to grab her.
‘Was Miss Whithurst trying to avoid you at this point, Mr Horton?’
‘Yes, I believe she was,’ he said.
‘Or perhaps she was just telling you that she was innocent?’
‘Well …’
‘That’s what she was doing, wasn’t she, protesting her innocence?’
‘Yes, but we’d seen her on CCTV stealing something.’
‘I’ll come on to that, Mr Horton, but first …’ I played more of the video. The two men grab Shandra and she topples over.
‘Were you taught to assault customers as part of your training, Mr Horton?’
‘She fell,’ he answered.
‘You pushed her, Mr Horton, look, you can see it again if you like. You and your colleague push this lady into the display of beer, don’t you?’
At this point the court was enraptured – in fairness to Mr Horton, he probably was trying to apprehend her, but it didn’t look good on the CCTV, and the fact that he now didn’t seem to give a toss just made it worse for him. It was an exercise in getting the jury to sympathise with my client.
I moved on. ‘Now, Mr Horton, you’ve told us that Miss Whithurst was a thief.’
‘Yes.’
‘What makes you say that?’
This was a bit of a dumb question by me, I’ve given him a free kick, a chance to simply regurgitate what can be seen on the earlier part of the CCTV footage. I cursed myself as soon as the stupid words left my stupid mouth.
‘Because of what we saw on the CCTV.’
But he slipped up. I’d been saved. My heart leapt. This was an unexpected opening.
‘Who saw it on the CCTV?’
‘Well, control saw it, and they relayed a description of the offender to me.’
‘So you didn’t see it yourself?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘Well did you or didn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘So why in your police statement did you say you’d seen the CCTV footage showing Miss Whithurst steal some goods?’
‘Well … it was a slip-up.’
‘No, Mr Horton, you were misleading the police and this jury.’ I turned emphatically towards the jury, beseeching them with my eyes and the expression on my face: look at this liar who is trying to mislead all of us.
‘So what else have you got wrong, Mr Horton?’
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you never saw Miss Whithurst do anything wrong?’
‘Not me personally, no.’
‘And so you just went up to a woman who, for all you knew, was entirely innocent and pushed her over.’
‘Well …’
‘I bet they didn’t teach you that on your course, did they, Mr Horton?’
I sat down, I felt ace. I felt like Perry bleeding Mason.
It took the jury twenty minutes to acquit Shandra Whithurst. She gave me a massive hug as she left.
‘Thank you, Mr Winnock,’ she said, and I looked coy and bashful, ‘you are the best barrister in the whole world.’
‘Oh,’ I said, and did a little limp-wristed ‘give over’ gesture with my hand.
‘From now on, whenever any of my friends get caught by the police they’ll be coming to you.’
I wanted her to stop now. Even I was getting embarrassed.
But, funnily enough, as you’ll soon see, she was as good as her word.
The City Magistrates Court
I’ve already mentioned the Magistrates Court a few times, so I’ll explain a bit more about it with a case I did a while back. Now, don’t get me wrong, the institution of lay magistrates trying their peers, or supposed peers, on less serious matters is a commendable aspect of our system – one which I would fight to retain (or at least write a strongly worded letter to retain). But, for any criminal barrister with an ounce of ambition, the Magistrates Court is a place to cut your teeth, a place where lessons are learned before you move on to the more serious cases in the Crown Court. The fact that I was still doing work in the Magistrates Court a few years into my career was a source of annoyance to me.
The City Magistrates Court is a terrible place; like a holding pen for the people who have been left behind by society. On arrival, you are immediately hit by the smell of despair that oozes from the pores of the petty thieves, junkies, pissed-up fighters, blokes who hit the Mrs on a Saturday night, kids with ASBOs, disgruntled drivers who were ‘never going that fast’, and parents who want the ground to open up and take them back to a time when their errant kid was still sweet and innocent.
That morning, I entered through the wooden double doors and sighed to myself.
The atmosphere here is different from that in the Crown Court; the Crown Court still holds fear for those who are summonsed to appear in it, the foyer and waiting areas are still cloistered with a hush of respect, whereas a trip to the Magistrates Court is more of an inconvenience. Those who are here don’t treat this place with any kind of reverence and the result is a simmering anarchy.
I made my way to court six. The court was in session and a ridiculously young-looking advocate was stuttering his way through a prosecution opening. In the back row was my mate Johnny. I was pleasantly surprised by the sight of him sitting looking quite interested in the case, even though he was not in it.
I sidled up to him. ‘Hello,’ I whispered. He didn’t turn to me, instead he whispered back, ‘You should hear this, mate.’ He said, ‘The bloke in the dock is up for bigamy, he’s had three wives on the go for the last five years.’
‘Christ,’ I said, ‘what’s he doing here, hasn’t the poor man suffered enough?’
‘At one point,’ continued Johnny, ‘to stop one of them from finding out, he completely re-wired the telephone junction box for the whole of his area.’
‘Crikey.’ I looked at the tired, pasty-faced, ordinary-looking man in the dock – our eyes met and he looked away, ashamed. He’s another person for whom a chain of wrong decisions had led to him finding himself at the wrong end of the criminal law.
We were interrupted by the usher, an ancient portly man, who leant over towards me. ‘Are you representing Danny Hooper, Mr Winnock?’
I nodded.
‘Well he’s slumped by the back door.’
I groaned and took myself off to the back door of the court building to find my client Dan
ny Hooper passed out by the door. I leant over him. ‘Danny,’ I said, gently at first, then louder, ‘Danny!’ I contemplated giving him a bit of a shake, but thought better of it – Danny was filthy, diseased and occasionally violent.
‘Danny!’ I shouted this time and he opened his eyes, for a second he frowned, clearly thinking, ‘Who the hell are you?’ then appeared to recognise me, and got to his feet with surprising agility.
‘Alright,’ he said.
‘Remember me, Danny?’ I said. ‘I’m Russell, Russell Winnock, remember, the barrister who’s looking after you.’
‘Alright,’ he repeated, then added quickly, ‘I haven’t done nothing, Mr Winnock.’
‘No, you have,’ I told him, ‘you threw a kebab at a copper.’
‘What copper?’
‘The one who was trying to move you on because you were swearing at the tourists.’
He looked vacantly at me. ‘I don’t remember no copper,’ he said quietly, ‘or any tourists.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to plead guilty to it, Danny. There are five coppers and about 25 Japanese tourists who were all there, and they weren’t off their tits on sherry.’
At this he opened his mouth and revealed a single black tooth and gave me a phlegmy laugh.
‘Alright,’ he said, ‘what’s going to happen? Am I going down?’
‘Not for a kebab. If you’d thrown a grenade at him, it might have been different.’
He laughed again. ‘Comedian you are, ain’t you.’
I smiled and shrugged, then a wave of alcohol fumes from his breath hit me. I decided to lay off the gags.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we’d better get into court.’
With that, Danny picked up the bottle of sherry that was sitting half consumed by the wall.
‘You can’t bring that into court,’ I told him.
‘I’m not leaving it here,’ he said.
And I considered reassuring him that unless a group of wandering vicars happened upon it, his sherry was probably safe – but I didn’t. Sherry, you see, was important to Danny. As a former methadone addict, due to the devastating effects that methadone has on the taste buds, it was now just about the only thing that he could taste. Heroin took away most of his youth and his health, the methadone that they put him on to take away his heroin cravings took away his teeth and his senses, and the two bottles of sherry he drank a day in place of the heroin had taken away his mind.
There was no way he was going to let anyone take away his sherry.
I watched as he placed the sherry bottle inside his coat and then put his hands inside his pockets to secure the bottle. We made our way to the courtroom.
The usher placed Hooper in the centre of the courtroom, right in front of the bench of Magistrates.
He stood there, his hands in his pockets and his head slightly swaying as the waves of twenty-odd years of substance abuse crashed around in his cranium.
‘Are you Daniel Mark Hooper?’ asked the Clerk.
‘I am,’ said Hooper, somewhat more confidently and coherently than I had expected.
‘Just a second,’ interrupted the Chairman of the bench. ‘Mr Hooper, you are in a court of law, please take your hands out of your pockets.’
I cringed at this – I knew that Hooper was using his hands to hold the bottle of sherry concealed inside his coat. I knew that Hooper knew that removing his hands would dislodge the bottle. For a second he stood there with his hands still inside his coat pockets as he contemplated what to do.
I watched him, enthralled. Everyone else watched him, confused.
Then, slowly … gingerly … he started to move: first he plunged his hands far down into his pockets, bending his knees as he did to get extra depth, then he started to rummage around the waistband region of his tracksuit bottoms as he clearly attempted to transport the bottle into his underpants. All the time, he stared at the bench and they stared in wonderment back at him. Eventually, after what seemed an age, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he pulled his hands out of his pockets, a big grin forming on his face. I half expected him to add a triumphant ‘Ta-Dah!’ But thankfully he didn’t.
I gave the bench my usual speech about how his life had been blighted by drugs and drink and how he now had Hepatitis A, B and C and how there were the first glimmers of hope because he did actually turn up for one of his probation meetings, which was progress, as previously he’d been too pissed.
The Magistrates sat through this, impassively, then retired, leaving me wishing I was in the Crown Court doing a big case, as Danny Hooper snored gently on a seat in the corner.
Johnny came up to me again. ‘You’ve got to get away from this, Russ, while you still can.’
I smiled and shrugged. ‘You could be right.’
‘You only have to say the word, and I can try to get you a job in our hotel, they’re desperate for people like us out there.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t do it,’ I said, ‘it’s still important to me. And anyway things will get better. Eventually, someone will realise that we actually do a good job, an important job.’
‘They won’t, Russ. Who wants to come to somewhere like this? Who cares what happens to people like him?’ He motioned towards the sleeping Hooper. ‘Most people just think they should throw away the key to his cell.’
I shrugged again. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
The Magistrates came back and sentenced Danny Hooper to a further period of supervision.
He slithered out of the court. I left as fast as I could.
A couple of weeks later I saw him again by the bus stop, he came bounding up to me. ‘Mr Winnock,’ he said, a bottle of Cockburns Extra Dry in his hand, ‘I was in court the other week.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I know.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I had this other barrister, he was great, really knew how to talk to the court he did, real gift of the gab.’
‘Yes mate,’ I said, ‘that was me.’
‘No, Mr Winnock, this bloke was ace. Wasn’t you. I thought I was going to prison for sure, but he kept me out, supervision.’
I sighed.
The Magistrates Court in the country
Not all Magistrates Courts are like the inner-city hell that is City Mags. As a baby barrister barely out of Bar School, I was sent to the middle of nowhere (well, a small town about forty minutes from Ipswich to be precise), to prosecute the Magistrates Court list.
I arrived at the small town Magistrates Court eager, with a clutch of files, each of which I had read and prepared thoroughly.
I parked my Ford Fiesta in a space that was reserved for ‘Attorneys At Law’, which made me feel fantastic, then made my way to the old slate-grey building. The foyer to small town Country Court was very different from the big city Magistrates Court. Sure, there were the same drug addicts hanging around, but they were addicts without the desperate grime of inner-city urban junkies. And yes, there were dishonest people as well, and nasty, violent people who had reasserted the masculine hierarchy of the village just after chucking-out time. But, even though many of the crimes were just as serious and the criminals just as hopeless, the feeling of desperation that is present in the urban courts was absent.
The foyer was quiet. As I opened the door, I could hear a pin drop. I looked at the nervous faces of those summonsed to appear, then looked for an usher.
‘I’m the prosecutor,’ I said. ‘I’ve come up from London.’
‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, her voice reaching a high pitch of excitement, before looking me up and down like an aunt might look at a nephew she hasn’t seen for a while, ‘come up from London,’ she repeated, ‘come this way.’
I was led into a small courtroom that was dominated by a massive square wooden table and a roaring fire. The usher motioned towards the roaring fire. ‘Don’t tell the Lord Chancellor’s Department,’ she said, ‘they tried to ban it,’ then she winked at me.
‘Where do I sit?’ I asked.
‘You sit there,’ she said, motioning to a space just in front of the fire, ‘the Magistrates sit there, the defence solicitor, who is usually Mr Mulhearn, sits there, the Clerk sits there and the Colonel sits there.’ She gestured to various seats around the large table.
‘The Colonel?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘the Colonel.’
I was too perplexed to enquire further.
I sat down and a little while later the various protagonists filed in. The Clerk was a middle-aged man with a beard, the Magistrates were two middle-aged men and one middle-aged woman wearing a striking green hat; and Mr Mulhearn was an ancient and massive man, who grinned at me as he sat down. At this stage there was no sign of the Colonel.
‘Up from London, are you?’ asked Mr Mulhearn.
‘Yes,’ I answered.
Mulhearn turned to the Magistrates and repeated to them, ‘Up from London, he is,’ motioning towards me with his thumb.
‘Very nice,’ said the lady in the hat and the Clerk may have said, ‘Bless him.’
Still no Colonel.
I stood up and the proceedings began.
The first set of cases concerned road traffic offences – which are always dull. We had about 50 speeders who’d been caught by a particularly cunningly placed camera off the Thetford bypass. My opening for each case was exactly the same, it went something like this: ‘This matter involves a Mr Harold X, he was driving his Ford Y, on the 25th May, when the Police static camera, 7892VK, photographed him driving at a speed of 37mph in a zone which is governed by a speed limit of 30mph.’
And, for the first 50 or so, the Magistrates simply fined the person £60 and gave them three points to go on their licence. Then, suddenly they got a bit fractious. Without warning, after I’d told them that a Vera Watson had been doing 35mph, the previously disinterested female Magistrate in the hat turned to her two colleagues and said, ‘That’s a bit unlucky, I mean, isn’t there a margin of whatsit?’
‘Yes, a margin of error,’ said the Chair as the other chap on the bench nodded in agreement. ‘Yes, there’s a margin of error.’
‘I mean, I know that stretch of road,’ hat lady continued, ‘it’s easy to forget that it’s a 30.’
Confessions of a Lawyer Page 11
