Ivor Bigg-Wigg - No Holds Barred: An Idiots Guide to the Art of Advocacy

CHAPTER ONE: TheAccused

GENERALLY SPEAKING, the accused will be asthick as two short planks, and on legal aid a most unattractive combination.Its a fact of life that the rich and successful very rarely get prosecuted,and, if they do, they wheel on the heavyweight luminaries of the legalprofession to bamboozle the jury and suck up to the judge. Assume thereforethat your client has none of these obvious advantages, and will start with onegrave disadvantage, namely that as hes in the dock he must be guilty ofsomething.

His appearance will be depressing, even ifhes put on his best suit for the occasion. If hes young, he will almostcertainly have some sort of ornament in his ear, and probably a wholecollection. If youre lucky, his tattoos will be discreetly hidden, along withthe more offensive messages contained thereon. If youre not, hell have athundering great tattoo right in the middle of his forehead with the crypticmessage Stuff the Pigs surrounded by snakes. Try not to stare, it only makesthings worse!

You will be expected to take instructionsfrom this creature of the black lagoon. This means, in short, that you willhave to listen to his side of the story.

If you are a solicitor, then you will invitehim to your office for a chat, and you will be prepared for the mountain youwill have to climb when his trial begins.

If you are a barrister, or counsel as youwill be known to one and all, to your face at least, then you may not have metyour client until you get to court, and there is little that can be done toprepare you for the shock. You will have to grin and bear it!

Your client, particularly the tattooed andbejewelled variety, will almost certainly have been charged under one or moreof the panaceaic public order offences so favoured by the police and themore aggressive members of the Crown Prosecution Service. He instructs you thathe is not guilty, so the first thing to do is to examine the strength of theevidence against him.

Lets assume, for the sake of illustration,that your client, paralytically drunk, has emerged from the Cock and BullPublic House on a Friday night at closing time with a group of his chums,singing a well-known refrain which hed learned over the years, one line at atime, on the terraces of his local football club. The prosecution eyewitnesseswill describe how the youth with the thundering great tattoo in the middle ofhis forehead, aided and abetted by his drunken companions, attacked a group ofinnocent bystanders, all to a man and woman perfectly respectable middle classmodel citizens (they invariably are!), kicking out and punching as many as werein range.

The police are called, and at least half adozen boys in blue will give evidence that they saw, amongst others, yourclient doing exactly that, and when challenged, he struggled violently and hadto be restrained. This is a police euphemism for the same half dozen officerspiling on top of your client, giving him the good kicking he richly deserves,handcuffing him, and then tossing him, like a sack of potatoes, into the backof a Transit van, with just enough force to avoid serious injury or the need tocall the police doctor.

After documentation at the police station,he will be interviewed in the absence of a solicitor (to be explained later),and he will have made a full confession to the crimes with which he is latercharged, and, to make matters worse, he will have signed it.