Tuesday 13 September 2011

Is there a trend to Police misconduct?

Another astonishing case from the Court of Appeal. A Court led by the Lord Chief Justice held that a sentence of 11 1/2 years imposed on a Police Officer who pleaded guity to misconduct in public office, perverting the course of justice, various offences of conspiracy and the posessuion of prohibited weapons and ammunition was not manifestly excessive.


The officer, amongst other things, held weapons at the behest of an unknown criminal.


How we get paid in the Crown Court

It will be repetitive, and in the repitition some of the astonishment may lessen, but the extraordinary cuts to Crown Court fees for solicitors deserves some sustained attention. What we get paid matters because in the end it will determine the quality of the work done for defendants and the quality of information available to the courts.


I recently completed a case in which the client was found not guilty after a two day trial in relation to allegations that she was in posession of stolen credit cards. There were only 55 pages of evidence in the case of this young woman of good character who had her car returned to her by her violent, abusive ex boyfriend a short time before her arrest. Her explanation for the stolen credit cards beneath a seat in the car was that they had been left there by him.


I had to make repeated requests for disclosure of all of his criminal record in order to write a very long letter to the CPS to show that there was a clear link between the types of criminality for which he had been convicted, and the criminal use of the credit cards. The Crown refused to discontinue the matter which went to trial when our client was happily acquitted.


In the Crown Court, fees are determined by a formula which links the number of pages of evidence, the seriousness and value of the case and the stage it reaches. The litigator fee for all the work will be £399. The fee is cut in part because we took the case as a transfer from other solicitors with whom the client was unhappy because they were doing no work!!


Misgivings about what is going on inside the Criminal Justice System are made worse when I interview a man who is on a suspended prison sentence who cannot remember which solicitor represented him. In part, this is because he was never asked to visit their office, never had any kind of proof of evidence taken from him to assist in the task of mitigating, and at face value, the guilty plea was probably wrongly entered.


All of this is a consequence of the abolition of time based fees and the imposition of formula based fees because it was claimed that they would lead to greater effecieny. In reality, they lead to less justice.