Many of these defence styles leave a lot to be desired

By Derek Lord

Published:

THE riveting mini-series Criminal Justice being screened this week by BBC1 over five nights paints a nightmarish picture of the current British justice system.

It tells the story of a daft young man, Ben Coulter, who borrows his father’s taxi when his own old banger won’t start and heads off for a night on the tiles. When he can’t find the switch for turning off the cab’s “for hire” sign, a young woman of questionable morals jumps into the back of the vehicle and invites him back to her place for a night of drink and drug-fuelled romance.

Ben’s nightmare starts when he wakes up to find that the girl, Melanie, has been stabbed to death, he is covered in her blood and in police custody accused of her murder.

He is introduced to a scruffy, world-weary duty solicitor, but when he tries to tell as much as he can remember of the night before, the solicitor tells him that nobody is interested in the truth: “We tell our story. They tell theirs. And the jury decides which story they like best.” He advises his young client to answer every question the police ask him with “no comment”. All this does is to convince the said police that the boy is guilty as charged.

Later, when Ben appears in court, he is advised by his defence barrister, an arrogant woman with a very dodgy hairdo, to admit to killing the girl in self-defence. It is clear that the barrister believes Ben murdered the girl, but she is prepared to blacken the dead girl’s name in order to get the charge reduced to manslaughter.

It is this willingness on the part of defence lawyers to use every trick in the book to get their clients off the hook that is at the heart of this story. The fact that the script comes from the pen of Peter Moffat, himself a former barrister, gives it all the more credence.

Of course, it’s not only in Britain that this attitude prevails. Last March, in Rome, two young Irish women were knocked down and killed. Friedrich Vernarelli was charged with drink driving, manslaughter, failure to stop and give help at the scene of an accident and damage to public property. He was found to be four times over the Italian legal drink-driving limit. You would think that this was an open and shut case, yet it was reported earlier this month that the driver’s lawyers were intent on getting blood tests on the victims to establish whether or not they were drunk at the time of their deaths.

Now, the ordinary punter might be forgiven for thinking that whether the dead women had had a drink or not was neither here nor there since the driver was clearly in no fit state to be behind the wheel of a car. But then defence lawyers do not think like you or me.

Where we see a case involving the deaths of two people at the hands of an irresponsible drunk, the lawyers regard it as a challenge and set about doing everything they can using mitigating circumstances, the judicial use of the right pleadings and rebuttals and motions of appeal and objections sustained to bamboozle a judge and jury into letting their client walk free.

And, of course, it isn’t only drunk drivers that are helped to evade justice in this manner. Defence lawyers are just as thorough when it comes to defending murderers, rapists, child molesters and gangsters.

Those same lawyers will accept no censure from the hoi polloi. They argue that everyone is entitled to the best possible defence. If asked how they can manage to look at themselves in the mirror after engineering the freedom of someone they know full well was guilty of some heinous crime, they simply point out that the police and the prosecution did not play the game as well as they themselves did.

If and when their former client goes on to rape and murder again, it doesn’t seem to bother their consciences one iota. It must take a particularly arrogant mind-set to be able to disassociate oneself from the results of manipulating the justice system in such a way as to secure the freedom of someone who is quite clearly a danger to one’s fellow-citizens.

I wouldn’t dare to suggest that any of Scotland’s defence lawyers view the legal system in such a cold, calculated way. Aside from the fact that they might sue me, I might need their services some day.

I can think of one or two people at the moment that I would gladly dispatch if I thought a clever lawyer could get me off with it.

On the other side of the world, Australian journalist Evan Whitton has written a book entitled Serial Liars: How Lawyers Get the Money and Get the Criminals Off. Whitton details chillingly all the methods that defence lawyers Down Under employ to manipulate the system: by having evidence ruled inadmissible; working to conceal anything that would reveal a pattern of criminal activity on the part of the defendant; confusing juries with fanciful definitions of what “reasonable doubt” actually means.

Whitton points out that 99% of the lawyers’ clients are guilty. However, while the term “guilty” means to the layman that the person in the dock did what it is they are accused of, to the lawyer, “guilt” is much too simple a term, and open to all sorts of interpretation, and that’s how they make their money.

The late Australian lawyer John Marsden, cited in Whitton’s book, once defended a man by the name of Ivan Milat on rape charges and managed, through clever cross-examination of one victim, to plant enough doubt in the jurors’ minds that they found him not guilty. Despite being gay himself, the lawyer also outed two of the victims in court as lesbians after seeing them in a gay bar he frequented.

Years later, Milat was convicted of the rape and murder of seven female backpackers in very similar circumstances. Marsden declared: “I am not proud of my conduct that day, but I had to act according to the ethics of the profession.”

Some ethics. Some profession.