As Hasan went through the facts, a woman, who I took to be the woman’s mother, the baby’s nan, was helped, sobbing, from the court.
Inwardly, I groaned. What could I say? How could words ever do justice to the way any of these people were feeling? How could I possibly have conveyed my client’s utter wretchedness, how his previously blemish-free life had been torn apart by his own mistake? A single mistake. His life ended that day as well.
I got up to my feet and asked the Judge if he had read the fifteen references that had been written on behalf of Peter Drake.
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Winnock,’ he said.
They were good references as well – kind words from local councillors and doctors and lawyers and other upstanding members of the community, and one from his wife, who tells of his love for her, their two children and four grandchildren. She wasn’t at court because he told her not to be. He knew she had already suffered enough.
‘Your Honour,’ I said, ‘Peter Drake is a man who knows that the family of Julie-Ann and Charlotte will never recover from the terrible way in which their lives were taken from them. Your Honour, he knows that it is no consolation to them. Every waking moment of every day he regrets what he did more deeply and profoundly than I can possibly articulate.’
Judge Percy nodded, it wasn’t easy for him either. I continued. I wasn’t on my feet for long, only long enough to tell the Judge about Peter Drake’s remorse, and how he helped treat the injured woman, and how his life was now devastated. The last point provoked an angry comment from the public gallery of the court, so I didn’t labour it. They were right, he may have been devastated, but at least he was still here.
Judge Percy sentenced him to four years imprisonment.
His life as a vet and a pillar of the community was over. He would never again nip down to his local and chat with the landlord in the free and easy way of a man of good character. He would never hold his head up in the same way; for the rest of his days, there would be a voice in the back of his mind that would remind him in whispered tones that he had killed a baby and a young mother – everything he did would come back to that.
The family and friends in pink didn’t think the sentence was long enough. How can it be fair, they said, four years, for the lives of a beautiful young woman and her baby? And they’re right – it wasn’t enough.
But in this case, there was no right, there was no justice – there was just law and process.
I left court as quickly as I could.
Wigs and gowns
You probably won’t have done this research yourself – so I’m going to help you. If you search the Internet, you will find websites to satisfy every sexual proclivity known to man and woman, but you won’t find anything relating to sexy barristers wearing a wig and gown. It just doesn’t exist, because no one finds barristers in wigs and gowns remotely sexy.
No one.
I mean, and trust me on this, there are websites about sexy plumbers, websites about sexy vicars, websites about nuns and monks and teachers (tons about teachers), there are even websites dedicated to sexy librarians – but not a single one that will show people, learned or otherwise, dressed in wigs and gowns and posing in a provocative way.
Why? Because they are just not sexy.
You never get adverts with the hunky barrister in his wig and gown, emerging in slow motion through flames with a puppy in his arms. A horsehair wig and austere black cape just doesn’t do it for anyone.
I once had a brief fling with an Irish girl, not long after I’d started at the Bar. One night after a few drinks we were back at mine and she asked me if I would put on my wig and gown. On request, I went into the bedroom, donned my courtroom kit and re-entered the lounge in what I hoped was a provocative way.
She looked at me, her face fell, and she left twenty uncomfortable minutes later.
When she declined my invitation to go for a drink some other time, she told me that it wasn’t me it was her, and that she saw me more as a friend. But I knew the truth, it was the sight of me in my barrister’s clobber. After that, she could never see me in the same way again. To her I had become devoid of sex.
And that, I suppose, is actually why we still wear them, in your wig and gown you are neutered and anonymous.
Some would get rid of the wig and gown in a flash. My mate, Ed Douglas – you remember him, the brainy guy at the Chancery Bar – he’d get rid of them in a second. He describes them as anachronistic and divisive. ‘How can you,’ he tells me, ‘with your lower-middle-class comprehensive school background, be in favour of something that has its roots in the privileges of the nineteenth century?’
‘I do,’ I say, ‘and long may the wig and gown continue.’
There have, in the last few years, been attempts to do away with them. There was a ballot a couple of years ago, but the overwhelming majority of criminal barristers voted to keep the ancient outfit.
And that’s how I voted, in favour of retention, and enthusiastically so, even though my own wig makes me look fat, rather weird and about as sexy as a pot of yoghurt.
So, why?
Well, it’s a bit like this: in my wig I am no longer Russell Winnock. I am no longer a man who enjoys the music of Neil Young, supports Huddersfield Town, watches Scandinavian detective TV dramas and once fell madly in love with a girl called Becky. I am merely a functionary of the court, I am ‘Learned Mr Winnock’, I am the prosecutor or the defence advocate, I am the person who asks questions of witnesses but doesn’t have to answer them.
I am allowed to be all of these things because of the disguise of the wig. It brings anonymity, it turns me from a person into simply another player in the theatre of the court.
There you are, telling a girl that she wasn’t really raped, that she was completely consenting to the act of having sex with this random stranger. You know that it’s rubbish, your client knows it’s rubbish, the jury have already decided that it’s rubbish and condemned the defendant, yet you have to go through it as best you can, regardless of the pain you are causing, because that is your job, that is your role in the system.
Some people think that we enjoy that, and perhaps sometimes we do, but not always, and that’s why the wig and gown helps. It means that at the end of the day you can take it off and walk away, and that act of transforming yourself from being a barrister back to being a human being – someone who would never in ordinary day-to-day life make such an assertion or ask such a question – completes the metamorphosis back to normality.
Murder
I was in my room with Amir Saddique, who was reading me extracts from an article on a Spurs website, which suggested that they were about to buy a player from an unknown Brazilian team for forty million quid.
‘I mean forty million!’ exclaimed Amir. ‘That’s just crazy. What kind of business spends that much money on something as brittle and as untested as a Brazilian midfielder, it’s bonkers.’
Before I had time to tell him that at Huddersfield Town the nearest we get to a Brazilian is when one of the girls who serves behind the bar gets her bikini line done, the phone went and I was summoned down to the Senior Clerk’s room.
I felt fairly confident that I was not in any trouble, but still, the summons from Clem Wilson is always enough to make your heart beat with a more trepidatious rhythm. That rhythm turned to outright fear, however, when I went through the door and spied Mrs Murdoch and Kelly Backworth of Whinstanley and Cooper Solicitors, who you will remember have said they would not instruct me if I was the last barrister on earth.
I looked from face to face, my eyes finally resting on Clem. I felt sure that they were about to tell me that Porky Phi had been killed by her husband, and that it was all my fault.
Clem talked first and seemed oddly upbeat. ‘Look, Mrs Murdoch,’ he said, ‘young Mr Winnock here is absolutely petrified.’
She looked stony-faced.
Clem now smiled at me in a rather slimy way. ‘They’ve come to give you a brief,’ he said.
‘Eh?’
‘You recently represented someone called Shandra Whithurst,’ interrupted Mrs Murdoch.
I nodded.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it turns out that Miss Whithurst was very happy with the way you represented her.’
‘Er, good,’ I stammered.
I was now utterly confused as to why Mrs Murdoch and Kelly Backworth were here talking about a shoplifter I managed to get off a few weeks earlier.
‘Well,’ continued Mrs Murdoch, ‘Shandra has a niece, called Tasha Roux.’
‘Yes?’
‘Who is currently in a police cell having been arrested on suspicion of murdering her partner.’
‘Right,’ I said, still unsure what this had to do with me.
‘She’s likely to be charged with murder in the morning, and, despite our best attempts, her aunt, Miss Whithurst, will only accept you as her barrister.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’
I tried to stifle a smile as the penny dropped and cascaded from my brain to my twitching lips. I looked over to Kelly, who seemed to be stifling a smile as well, though I might be wrong.
Clem interjected, ‘Yes, Mr Winnock, I’ve told Mrs Murdoch that you’ll be quite happy to be the junior in a murder case, won’t you?’
Would I? Too bloody right I would. My first murder. This is precisely why I came to the Bar in the first place. This was a proper case!
Good old Shandra Whithurst. God bless her. I felt like laughing out loud, but thankfully realised that would be wholly unprofessional.
Mrs Murdoch continued, ‘Of course, you’ll be applying for a QC to lead you.’
‘Of course.’
‘Good, and Kelly here will be the fee earner from our place doing the brief. You two can start work on it this afternoon, if that’s okay?’
I smiled now. I couldn’t help it.
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ I said, ‘but, Mrs Murdoch,’ I ventured, ‘I thought that you wouldn’t instruct me if I was the last barrister on earth. I thought I was NIHWTLBOE?’
The old solicitor scowled. ‘For reasons best known to her, Mr Winnock, Miss Shandra Whithurst thinks that you are the only barrister on earth.’
I smiled again as Mrs Murdoch bade us all good day and left the room. I looked at Kelly – Christ, she was gorgeous.
‘What’s it all about then?’ I asked her.
‘She’s killed her boyfriend, probably in self-defence.’
Brilliant. A proper issue in a murder trial. This was exactly what I’d been waiting for ever since I’d sat down with my mum and dad and watched Kavanagh QC on the telly all those years ago. This would be my biggest case yet. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Shandra Whithurst.
Facebook
That night, I placed the few skimpy pages concerning Tasha Roux on my kitchen table and looked at them. The facts were these: Tasha Roux was 23 years old and had pushed her partner, a man named Gary Dickinson, over the stairwell of the sixth floor of their block of flats, killing him. In her interview she had claimed she had pushed him in self-defence.
All I had was a few statements from police officers saying that they had arrived to find Tasha crying by the top of the stairwell and Gary Dickinson dead at the bottom. There were also a couple of statements from neighbours saying they’d heard one almighty row, followed by a scream.
I read them, listening initially to my chanting monks – which was too creepy in the circumstances, so I changed and listened to The Cocteau Twins, whose unfathomable lyrics and ethereal guitars worked just fine – then, out of curiosity, I clicked onto Facebook and checked the profile page of my client Tasha Roux.
It isn’t the first time I’ve checked the Facebook page of a client or a witness in a case, and yes, it is true, I confess, that if the witness or client is a woman under 30, I’m slightly more likely to do so than if it is some meathead bloke in his forties.
The Facebook page of Tasha Roux was just as I expected it to be. There were pictures of her with groups of girls of a similar age, smiling and holding drinks, wearing their best frocks, pouting and tilting their heads like all girls seem to do when they’re having their photo taken in a nightclub.
And, chillingly, there were pictures of her and the deceased Gary Dickinson, together, by a swimming pool, with blue sky behind them and the clean plastic white of a sun lounger beneath them as they smiled for the camera.
I formed an instant impression of both of them.
She was beautiful, young and slim. She didn’t look vulnerable though, in fact quite the opposite. She had a small tattoo on her shoulder and a strong, street-wise texture to her face and lips. She was no fragile beauty, but rather a woman whose looks might see her end up with the wrong kind of man.
As for Dickinson, I probably shouldn’t say it, but I instantly had him down as a twat. A hard man, clearly very impressed with his own biceps, who almost certainly had a string of convictions for violence and drugs and petty crime. He had short hair and a menacing closed-mouth smile. His tattoos spelt out the names of children he’d sired and the parents who outlived him.
There were already comments on her Facebook page. Some were supportive, some not. One said, ‘Stay strong bby – we luv ya XXX’, whilst another hoped that she would ‘rot in hell’ and called her a skank and a whore.
I sighed. Bloody Facebook.
It’s massive, we all know that, but what many won’t have considered is the way in which it has become increasingly significant in the courts, and in particular the Criminal and Family Courts. There is rarely a case today in which Facebook doesn’t play some kind of role.
Sometimes it is used to help in the identification of witnesses. Increasingly, victims or witnesses will be told the name of the person who allegedly beat them up or mugged them, and, armed with this information, they then go onto Facebook and confirm the identity. And this is a problem, it’s fraught with difficulties. It’s not a proper identification, particularly if they’ve made it before they’ve made a statement to the police. Think about it. Normally, an individual makes a statement to the police in which they describe the individual who they say committed the crime. They tell the police officer that the person has, perhaps, brown hair and blue eyes and is about six foot and as much else as they can remember, and if the issue of identification is important (if the suspect denies it’s him), then there will be an identification parade.
But if the person looks at Facebook before talking to the police, the description that they give to the police isn’t a description of the person they remember committing the offence, but a description of the person they’ve seen on Facebook, who they’ve been told may have committed the offence. And, with the best will in the world, they may have got that wrong. It is, as I say, fraught with danger.
Then there’s the temptation for jurors to do what I’ve done and go onto Facebook and look at the pictures and profile pages of those who are involved in the case. Like me, they’ll make instant judgements about someone based on their photos and comments, and yes, like me, the judgements will be unfair and more often than not wrong. Judges now have to warn jurors about going on Facebook. They tell them that in doing so they risk going to prison for contempt of court, and the jurors sit there and nod, but I often wonder how many jurors have a little sneaky look, just to be nosey. After all, as long as they keep quiet about it, no one will know. But it does pervert the process, because that juror will have been party to some information that no one else has seen, which the defendant has no chance whatsoever of rebutting.
But Facebook doesn’t just affect witnesses and jurors; the Internet has created new crimes that people commit that they couldn’t before. Crimes involving the grooming of underage girls and boys for sex by old perverts who masquerade on Facebook as teenagers.
Or that chap in the North West who, during the riots a few years ago, wrote on his Facebook page that he was going to start a riot in his home town. Even though everyone told him not to be so stupid, no one actua
lly lifted a finger in anger and the bloke himself never actually left his house let alone threw a petrol bomb or looted a branch of Sports Direct, he received a prison sentence of four years for his trouble.
Similarly, I once represented a young woman who had posted the name of a rape victim on her Facebook page – which is a crime. I asked her why she had done it and she told me that she put everything on her Facebook page. That was the way she communicated, everything went on there – every thought, every picture, every night out, every argument, everything. She couldn’t understand what she had done wrong. I remember asking her if she thought that was wise, and then immediately regretted asking, because to her it was a way of expressing herself, and who am I to criticise that.
I clicked onto my own Facebook page. Johnny Richardson had sent me a message inviting me to his ‘Off to Dubai Leaving Party’. No doubt once he was gone I’d keep in contact with Johnny through Facebook. He would post pictures of him and his smiling wife on camels, in casinos and on beaches, and I would comment and feel close to him, whereas in reality the relationship wouldn’t be the same.
I went to turn my computer off but stopped, paused, and clicked onto another Facebook page. Kelly Backworth’s page. I looked at her profile picture as the rest of her pictures were for friends only, and I wasn’t, yet, one of those. Her profile picture didn’t really do her justice, it was of her standing outside a church, probably at a wedding. I toyed with the idea of asking her to be my friend, but I decided against it. I didn’t want her to think that I was touting for work or trying to shag her, either way would be totally inappropriate. After all I had a brief in a murder case now. That, surely, made me a serious barrister.
I took one last peek at her profile. Under relationship status it said ‘blank’. What did that mean? Did she have a bloke? Was she single? Bloody Facebook telling us everything and nothing of importance.
Confessions of a Lawyer Page 14
