A day in the life of a Criminal Defence Solicitor – Part 5

A day in the life of a Criminal Solicitor – Part 5

Rob is a higher courts advocate but his main practice is in the magistrates court, the youth court and at the police station where he has a wealth of experience in representing clients.

In Part 5 of this series, Rob Beighton discusses yet another case that ended in his client being acquitted.

People are always interested to know exactly what being a criminal defence lawyer involves and typical questions often relate to the moral issues presented to us. So we thought we would put together a series of blogs designed to explain what we get up to and why we do what we do.  This is part 3. Part 1 can be found here, part 2 here, part 3 here and Part 4 here.

The reality is, it’s not our job to make moral judgments about other people’s lives. It is our job to provide logical and coherent advice, based on the legal position and to assist people who are often at a point of crisis.

Who was threatening whom?

On Friday of last week I went to court to deal with a trial of a man that was alleged to have threatened to attack someone at his place of work.

My client had entered an office to complain that his car had been hit by a refuse collection lorry.  His complaint was rejected by the member of staff.  It was the prosecution case was that my client had been extremely abusive to the member of staff, threatening to take the matter outside.  Strangely the member of staff then left the office to go outside to the car park where he stood close to my client’s car.  This left my client in the office whereupon he called the police.

The prosecution’s case was that my client had then left the office and approached the man in the car park and repeated his threats, before eventually leaving. The police attended some time later, took accounts from a number of office workers and subsequently arrested my client.

CCTV evidence – helpful when it exists

Despite repeated requests from the police, the CCTV covering the incident had been overwritten by the company before the trial and was not available.  Although witnesses were more than happy to give evidence to the court about what the CCTV showed, I made a successful application to exclude that evidence.

The magistrates took less than 25 minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty.

Rob is a higher courts advocate but his main practice is in the magistrates court, the youth court and at the police station where he has a wealth of experience in representing clients.