Episode three makes Geeklawyer wish there were more than just four episodes to this series. The obses­sion with stu­dents abated some­what in this episode and we actu­ally got to see real bar­ris­ters at play.

In some ways that wasn’t an alto­gether good thing. This weeks episode was partly focused on the chang­ing face of the crim­i­nal bar. An hour pro­gram couldn’t hope to scratch the sur­face of what and why — the pol­icy dri­ven changes, so instead it just showed the dif­fer­ing lives of two crim­i­nal bar­ris­ters on either sides of the widen­ing chasm of crim­i­nal work at the Bar. On one side was Annie Evans who had taken her 30 pieces of sil­ver to work in-house for the CPS and on the other was Dickie Bond (first seen in episode one).

Poor Dickie — prob­a­bly the most charis­matic of the bar­ris­ters so far, since they didn’t fol­low Geeklawyer, is seen to bemoan his drop in income now that the CPS are redi­rect­ing their money to their newly acquired in-house bar­ris­ters. His rather delight­ful chil­dren are seen frol­ick­ing at the bench of a North­ern mag­is­trates court on an Open Day. They were pre­tend­ing to be mag­is­trates and pass­ing extreme sen­tences on the accused despite no under­stand­ing of the law and no coher­ent pros­e­cu­tion evi­dence. So, then, an uncan­nily accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of real mag­is­trate court life.

The CPS chief pros­e­cu­tor in the Mid­lands, one David Blun­dell, was quoted on the changes as say­ing that the Bar needed to work in a com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment. His view was that it would have to get used to being “cheaper and quicker” The one adjec­tive he con­spic­u­ously and tellingly failed to use was ‘bet­ter’. Geeklawyer feels that this was more than a mere acci­den­tal ver­bal slip and shoddy advo­cacy by a CPS lawyer (Who’d have thought that?). Rather, he thought it an uncon­scious expres­sion of the val­ues behind the in-house bar­ris­ters of the CPS and their employ­ers in the gov­ern­ment: get every­thing done quickly and cheaply — qual­ity work would be nice, but above all else make it cheap and fast.

Two nicely coun­ter­pointed scenes illus­trated the dif­fer­ence between these diverg­ing pros­e­cut­ing col­leagues: one was an encounter between inde­pen­dent bar­ris­ter Dickie Bond in the rob­ing room and the other was Annie Evans in a con­fer­ence with her police colleagues.

In the rob­ing room there was a full-on pas­sive aggres­sive row between the mediocre defense bar­ris­ter and our Dickie:

Defense Bar­ris­ter: “are these addi­tional evi­dence?” (Deep mock­ing bow by Dickie: i.e. ‘yes’)

Defense Bar­ris­ter: “This no doubt assists me in what I need to do”

Dickie (to cam­era): “I antic­i­pate a guilty plea change”.

Defense Bar­ris­ter (over­hear­ing dis­course to cam­era): “you hope!”

Dickie (over shoul­der): “because he’s stuffed”

Defense Bar­ris­ter (whiney & defeated): “… rea­son why we are where we are is a tardy Crown … Can’t spend time dis­cussing this non­sense — I need lunch” (Geeklawyer won­dered whether crim­i­nal bar­ris­ters ate lunch, surely they are too poor? Per­haps they scrape around in the bins behind the court?)

Dickie: “your client won’t think nonsense”

Defense Bar­ris­ter: “my client needs [social lurve]’

To most this would sound an aston­ish­ingly tame dia­logue, but for the rob­ing room it was prac­ti­cally a knife fight, and most intrigu­ing telly. The one thing you can say of the Crim­i­nal Bar is that while they may not be gen­tle­men at least they are not gen­tle men.

The wretched Annie Evans was held up as the van­guard of the Bar in-house at the CPS. Dear God, what a mis­er­able image it was. We were told she is a bar­ris­ter of some 24 years call. For all that, in a scene in the court, she seemed anx­ious to paint her­self as some David against the Goliaths of the Crim­i­nal Bar: a weak, poor lit­tle state pros­e­cu­tor against the over­pow­er­ing wealth of lawyers for the defense. No doubt this angle would play well with David Blun­kett, Jacqui Smith or any of the other author­i­tar­ian loons of Neo-Labour seek­ing to under­mine the defences of the accused. One has to won­der what Ms Evans had spent her quar­ter of a cen­tury of working-life doing if com­bat­ing such oppo­nents was such a new and daunt­ing expe­ri­ence. The rea­son became all too appar­ent later: she was a drongo.

The voice over told us Ms Evans earn­ings had dropped sharply since join­ing CPS but the ben­e­fits such as hol­i­day pay & bet­ter brief­ings by ‘client’ jus­ti­fied it: yes, not at all defen­sive, we all believe you, really. And the fact that she was 50% cheaper meant she was deter­mined, pos­i­tively absolutely deter­mined, to show jus­tice was not com­pro­mised. Appar­ently this merely involved talk­ing to vic­tims in a Ruth Kelly style Basso Pro­fundo voice and assur­ing them that all would be well. Supe­rior advo­cacy and impar­tial case man­age­ment didn’t get a men­tion. Of course, as the say­ing goes: “If you pay peanuts you get a mon­key”. One can only hope Ms Annie Evans doesn’t throw shit through the bars too.

The down side of course, on the small mat­ter of jus­tice, was that while the Inde­pen­dent Bar was, mostly, treated with respect by pros­e­cu­tors, their pro­fes­sion­al­ism and skills at lit­i­ga­tion man­age­ment treated as unques­tion­able, the lot of the CPS Pros­e­cu­tion Mon­key is very much a less happy one. We were treated to the sight of a ‘client’ con­fer­ence where Annie was being sec­ond guessed and instructed in how to do her job by some toe-rag cop­per who asked ques­tions such as: “Can you give us an idea of how you will use CCTV in cross exam­i­na­tion? How much detail on CCTV  […]”, Do you intend to do X with all defen­dants? How do you intend to use the sched­ule?”. Frankly, Geeklawyer utterly cringed with embar­rass­ment at her pub­lic humil­i­a­tion. Any inde­pen­dent bar­ris­ter would have slapped the filth down with a curt “Thank you for your advo­cacy advice but I believe that you know how to catch crim­i­nals bet­ter than I and I know how to pros­e­cute them bet­ter than you.” Annie obvi­ously appre­ci­ated how bad this made her look. Her response to cam­era, when the dom­i­nant cop­per was nicely and safely out of earshot, was:

“At the Inde­pen­dent Bar the filth let you get on with the job. I could have been more abrupt and told the offi­cer that the exam­i­na­tion of wit­nesses in court was my busi­ness, but I don’t want to run it in such a dic­ta­to­r­ial style, I want to be as co-operative as pos­si­ble, but it has got in the way a bit, espe­cially today”

Bully for you Annie “The Door­mat” Evans, what a credit you are to the Bar. Still, best to do as you are told by your own­ers: I sup­pose when the filth want to with­hold evi­dence from the defense you will also be as anx­ious to be co-operative and non-dictatorial?

Most aston­ish­ing was Ms Evans joy and break­ing down, tears for fuck sake, on being rung by her own­ers from court to tell her that there had been a guilty plea. This was appallingly unpro­fes­sional: her job is one of dis­in­ter­ested pros­e­cu­tion rather than per­sonal involve­ment. With­out know­ing Ms Evans Geeklawyer is, based on the film, of the view that she rep­re­sents the typ­i­cal in-house CPS lawyer: bot­tom of the bar­rel scrap­ings who failed at the Inde­pen­dent Bar and then have to eke out the best liv­ing that third-eleven can­di­dates can in a hyper-competitive profession.

We also got to see the lot of the charm­ing pupil Kakoly Pande as she approached ten­ancy: this next great hur­dle to the pro­fes­sion has not got much atten­tion from the pro­gram mak­ers, in their inex­orable quest to fol­low Bar stu­dents. Kakoly was shown in rather Dick­en­sian digs, so lim­ited was her pupil­lage income it was all she could afford, while still being expected to turn up at dis­tant and appar­ently ran­domly chang­ing Inner Lon­don mag­is­trates courts on weird days. Of course, hav­ing had a pupil­lage, the lot of a 3rd six pupil is, while still tough, not so tough as for a pupil­lage can­di­date. Despite that it was heart­warm­ing to see Kakoly finally get a tenancy.

Which leaves us to won­der what will hap­pen in the final episode? Hope­fully Cat will get a deserved pupil­lage. We dis­cover that Annie goes off on a spon­sored sec­ond­ment to Canada. Accord­ing to her Inn, this is to see how another Com­mon Law juris­dic­tion works and to tell them how our pro­fes­sion works: though as some­one with­out any legal expe­ri­ence beyond apply­ing unsuc­cess­fully for pupil­lages one had to won­der if this wasn’t a shade spec­u­la­tive. Still, she will at least be able to post flames on this blog review from Canada if she wishes. Some­one in Canada is, Geeklawyer just won­ders who?