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The Secret Barrister Profile picture
@BarristerSecret
Sep 13, 2020 • 16 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
“Seeing justice truly done” is an interesting soundbite.

Is it, as this incoherent, sub-sixth-form essay rant suggests, only about locking more people up for longer?

Or does “justice truly done” mean a little more?

[THREAD]
Justice truly done means people not being forced to wait years for trials due to the government’s long-term refusal to resource the courts, which has caused a huge backlog (that they are falsely trying to blame on Covid). lawgazette.co.uk/news/new-figur…
Justice truly done means abolishing the Innocence Tax, by which the government refuses you legal aid, forces you to pay privately for your legal defence team and then, when you’re acquitted, refuses to reimburse you, leaving you penniless. thetimes.co.uk/article/ditch-…
Justice truly done means stopping selling off the courts. Over 150 courts have been closed down since 2010. Some people - defendants, witnesses, victims - now have to endure a 5-hour round trip on public transport to reach their “local” court. thetimes.co.uk/article/court-…
Justice truly done means making courts that are still open fit for human use. Basics such as running water, working lifts, non-leaking roofs, heating & functioning toilets don’t exist in many courts, left to rot by ministers who don’t have to visit them. ft.com/content/88b5f3…
Justice truly done means stopping the abuse of “Release Under Investigation” (RUI), brought in after the govt changed the laws on police bail to win cheap headlines. RUI sees suspects released for years while investigations plod at a snail’s pace. lawgazette.co.uk/news/police-fi…
Justice truly done means funding digital forensic investigation units so that it does not take over 12 months to examine a mobile phone, which causes enormous delays before files can even be sent to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging decision. policeprofessional.com/news/forensic-…
Justice truly done means reversing the c£1bn cut to prisons that has resulted in dangerous understaffing & overcrowding, a collapse in training and education, record violence and self-harm, rampant drug abuse, infestation and “not a single establishment safe to hold children.”
Justice truly done means finding the £195m required to fund Rape Crisis Centres properly so that thousands of survivors don’t find themselves cut adrift with no support rapecrisis.org.uk/news/latest-ne…
Justice truly done means addressing the problems that followed the government’s closure of the Forensic Science Service in 2012, which led to private providers and police laboratories failing to meet basic standards, jeopardising criminal investigations. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-385278…
Justice truly done means comprehensively reviewing the magistrates’ court system, which hands unqualified volunteers the power to send the rest of us to prison for up to a year, in conditions of sausage factory justice.
Justice truly done means reversing the debilitating funding cuts to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the statutory body responsible for investigating miscarriages of justice. theguardian.com/law/2018/sep/0…
Justice truly done means reversing the cuts to youth services (up to 91% in some local authorities) which the All Party Parliamentary Group on Knife Crime suggested are linked to the increase in knife crime. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-481763…
Justice truly done means addressing mental health provision. The criminal justice system, and especially prisons, are crammed with people who should not be there. Criminal justice does not exist in a vacuum. The whole system must do better. justice.org.uk/people-mental-…
Justice truly done means improving understanding of the criminal justice system through public legal education. And ensuring that as PM you don’t worsen the problem by spreading #FakeLaw. Speak truth. Even if you have to plagiarise a legal blogger to do it newsweek.com/boris-johnson-…
Justice truly done requires honesty about where the problems in criminal justice lie.

It means not treating the public like fools by pretending that criminal justice is nothing more than longer prison sentences.

Justice is so much more.

Don’t let them lie to you.

#FakeLaw

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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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