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The Secret Barrister Profile picture
@BarristerSecret
Jul 31, 2020 • 3 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Lord Faulks QC was the right-hand minister to Chris Grayling at the MoJ from 2014, when legal aid was obliterated and Grayling was attempting to restrict judicial review, branding it “a promotional tool for left-wing campaigners”.

There’s nothing like an impartial tribunal.
Other fun facts:

Lord Faulks was responsible for spreading #LegalAidLies by falsely claiming, in Parliament, that legal aid lawyers earn “£200 an hour” fullfact.org/law/legal-aid-…
During Grayling’s efforts to pass the most pointless law of all time (the “Heroism Bill”), Lord Faulks was mocked in the House of Lords as “the straight man in Mr Grayling’s comedy routine.” lawgazette.co.uk/law/ridiculous…

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More from @BarristerSecret

The Secret Barrister Profile picture
Oct 31
Why might there be a delay in the details of a police investigation being made public?

Well, many reasons. None of which relate to a conspiracy or a “cover-up”.

Let’s take a quick look🧵👇
First there are the practicalities of modern investigations, particularly in serious and complex cases where the police are reviewing multiple digital devices, such as mobile phones and computers.
Sometimes a device is encrypted, or a suspect won’t give their PIN, which makes it more time-consuming for the police to access the device. If/when they do, a mobile phone “download” can contain tens if not hundreds of thousands of pages to review. This takes time.
Read 17 tweets
The Secret Barrister Profile picture
Sep 16
Why did Huw Edwards avoid prison?

Is this evidence of “two-tier justice”?

Let’s take a quick look. 🧵

TLDR: This is an entirely expected sentence for offences of this type.
Huw Edwards pleaded guilty to “making” 41 indecent photographs of a child.

The first point to note is that “making” is misleading - the offence was possessing them on a computer, rather than creating or recording the images. The law is grossly confusing in this area.
For an offence of possessing images of this type, the court must follow the relevant Sentencing Guideline, here: sentencingcouncil.org.uk/offences/magis…
Image
Read 16 tweets
The Secret Barrister Profile picture
Jul 29
It is regrettable that whoever wrote this thread did so in apparent ignorance of what the law actually says.

It is really rather wildly misleading.

[THREAD 🧵]
The thread offers a hypothetical of a person breaking a car window to rescue a child, only to find themselves charged with criminal damage and prevented by the judge from mentioning this critical circumstance to the jury.

Just like climate activists.

Only…it’s false.
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If you’re sitting cosily for a law lecture (and who among us is not?), the issue arises from one of the legal defences available to criminal damage.

It is a defence if you believe the owner consented or *would have consented* had they known of the damage and its circumstances. Image
Read 12 tweets
The Secret Barrister Profile picture
Jan 9
As the issue of compensation for miscarriages of justice is rightly in the news, it’s timely to note that in 2014, the government changed the law to make it all but impossible for people wrongly convicted and imprisoned to claim compensation.
Chris Grayling and Theresa May led the charge to deprive the wrongly convicted of compensation, changing the rules so that those people had to effectively prove their innocence - an impossible standard to meet.

The details are in Stories of The Law & How It’s Broken.

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When this spiteful non-compensation scheme was challenged in the courts, the current crop of politicians - those who are now positioning themselves as champions of the wrongfully convicted - fought all the way to uphold it.

amp.theguardian.com/law/2018/may/0…
Read 4 tweets
The Secret Barrister Profile picture
Dec 3, 2023
Can highly recommend this piece in today’s Sunday Times if you’re looking for a facile misunderstanding of what a barrister actually does.

If Mr Syed had bothered to speak to a barrister, or indulge in the most cursory research, he would have learned at least two things: 🧵

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1. 90% of a barrister’s career is spent on making decisions. Advising on courses of action, of legal risk, future consequences, assessing evidence and making split-second judgement calls (both in and out of court) that can make an irrevocable decision to a person’s life. Image
2. It’s an obvious one, and an old favourite, but given that it seems to take Mr Syed by surprise:

BARRISTERS ARE NOT THEIR CLIENTS.

We ask questions in court and test evidence, on behalf of whoever instructs us, because that is our job.

We are not expressing personal views. Image
Read 4 tweets
The Secret Barrister Profile picture
Aug 3, 2023
Ah, hello old friend.

It’s been a while.

Let’s hop back on the horse: Why this story about legal aid is as misleading as it is brainless.

[THREAD] 🧵

#LegalAidLies
Readers are invited to conclude that £100,000 (£100,028, to be precise) is too much to spend on this very serious case, in which an MP was murdered. A “ridiculous amount of money”, we’re reliably told by Conservative MP @nigelmills.

Well let’s see. Image
The first teeny, tiny point - and I really am being picky - is that, despite @nigelmills confidently asserting that the defendant “admitted the killing”, that’s not actually true. Not really.

Because the same article tells us that he denied murder and had a 7-day trial. Image
Read 22 tweets

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