The Secret Barrister- Watching the guilty walk free: Prosecuting on the cheap

Summary

In Chapter 4 of The Secret Barrister- Stories of the law and how it is broken we look at the moments before the first trial where the CPS and Barristers desperately try to get as much information about the case as possible including all the evidence, background information, previous convictions and everything else. In this chapter, we look at a case where this young girl gets assaulted by this man and is convicted of grievous bodily harm with intent which is the most serious form of assault short of murder and the guilty can get life imprisonment for this crime. I will not go in too much detail as I want you to read the book for yourself but put short this man has seriously harmed this young girl and the writer uses this case for this chapter and the issues raised within it.

First of all, we learn that there are guidelines that the police have to follow for taking cases to court and they must think about whether firstly it is likely to lead to a conviction and secondly that it is in the public interest to take this case to court. The problem here is that both the police and CPS Lawyers can both make mistakes. The most common reason the police make mistakes is that they do not have the full legal expertise of the lawyers and so may not be too experienced with the law.

Next, we learn about the brief which use to come in paper form but is now comes as an email. The brief contains as mentioned above all the information about the case including the Background information, previous convictions, evidence and so on which gives the lawyers an idea of what the case is about and how they can successfully do their job. We learn, however, that much of the time the Lawyers do not receive all the information which should be included in the brief and so this can lead to lots of chaos and asking the judge for many adjournments. The reason for this lost information is large because of CPS staff and budget cuts and the staff having unbearable workloads. Another reason that the evidence can not always be present is that the police either do not provide the interview information or do not get the evidence for a variety of reasons but the problem is they will dismiss the case with little or no evidence as they do not have a case.

The biggest lesson we learn here is that if there is no evidence then there is no case.