Why I don’t do Criminal Law

Yesterday was spent in devotion to my patron saint: Saint Ferris of Bueller. A belt-bursting lunch in Wodka in Kensington was followed by a gentle amble down to the White Horse Pub on Parsons Green for a couple of pre-match pints. I enjoyed 90 minutes of watching Chelsea trounce Aston Villa and then returned home after another essential detour to the Pub.

Thus, I was to be found, at 12:20 am, stumbling contentedly down the Kingston Road. As I approached number 217 I heard the sound of breaking glass. The house was in darkness and set back from the road. I stopped and listened. Again I heard glass breaking and could see by the downstairs window the silhouette of man. An afternoon of Polish beer and strong Bitter had not dulled the keen edge of the Moobsian mind and I quickly concluded that there was burglary in progress (albeit not a particularly stealthy one).

I toyed with the idea of confronting the burglar but playing the scenario through in head a couple of times always seemed to end up unhappily for me, so I abandoned vigilante justice in favour of calling the Police.

I held my mobile in my hand and tried to decide whether this constituted an emergency or not. “What the heck” I thought and dialled 999. Within minutes, I was told, two “units” would be on their way. In fact, within a minute I was chasing a police car up the street as the eagle-eyed officers had failed to spot a big fat bloke doing star jumps on the pavement in an attempt to attract their attention. Perhaps they thought I was doing some impromptu midnight Jazzercise.

The two policemen and I were joined, incongrously, by a man in a dinner jacket and black bow tie; another passer-by alerted by the tinkle of broken window pane and sucked into the unfolding drama. Together we peered into the darkness and could hear the sound of stumbling about and cursing. The policemen sprang into action whilst we entertained a police sergeant who had, by now, driven up to the curb to join us.

I heard one officer announce that he was arresting the “suspect” and Mr Black Bowtie and I waited in eager anticipation to see the villain brought to justice. The criminal that emerged from the gloom was not, disappointingly, Raffles the Gentleman Cat Burglar. Instead he was a shambling Glaswegian in a baseball cap either leathered on booze or high on drugs. He did not shake his fist at us or say “I would have got away with it had it not been for you meddling middle-aged gentlemen”. Instead he said “greahhnuhfungerhurrugher” and was deposited on the back seat of the police vehicle and driven away. In other words, he was pretty much your typical villain.

When I first decided to become a lawyer I was attracted by the idea of becoming a criminal advocate. I was rapidly put off by the criminals. Most of them were mind-bogglingly dim. I once spent an afternoon with a man who had gone to prison after he had, for a joke, put an alarm clock in a shoebox marked “Property of the IRA” and put it on a table in pub in Colchester (a garrison town).

He told me proudly that he had written a book about his life in Prison and showed it to me. It was a red Silvine exercise book in which he had scratched away with a biro. The title had an endearing directness: “My life in Prisson”. He promised me that it was full of incident. “I write about when I played chess with a child murderer” he said proudly. He then turned to the relevant page and pointed to a short passage of prose: “I played chess with a child murderer” it said.

It was plain that his fight with the law was an uneven battle. Which leads me to the second surprising thing about the clients I encountered: they had all done it. Every single one of them was guilty. That is not to say they all got convicted, but they were all guilty. This amazed me because my expectations had been formed by television. On television anyone who is guilty of an arrestable offence always, at some point, does something of sufficient cruelty that you can be certain that they will be shot to death by a policeman or a feisty potential victim before the final scene. One only sees the inside of a courtroom when an innocent citizen is in peril of a false conviction. The reality was a dreary procession of alcoholic or drug-dependent inadequates, sobered for the day, their hair scraped back by a combination of spit and wrist-fracturing effort with a comb. Their familiarity with arrest and trial was such that they rarely even seemd to engage with the process having to be prompted to stand, prompted to plead and sometimes prompted as to their own identities. If at one end of the criminal food chain are Rolex-wearing Colombians with Uzis, splashing photo-genically across the sea in powerboats, the scaggy prematurely-aged sneak thieves of Colchester represented its shit-encrusted rectal termination. This was not, I decided, the job for me.