Rating: 5/5
Review:
An excellent, timely book
This is excellent.
It's very readable and often witty in style, but its message is stark
and worrying: we have a serious problem in the criminal justice system which is
getting worse.
Written by an (understandably) anonymous barrister, The
Secret Barrister is an account from the inside of the realities of the English
and Welsh legal system. It is
interesting and very clear about how we came to have the current system, its
undoubted strengths, its true aims and the terrible mess which so often
prevents those aims of fairness to all being achieved. The author puts his case with genuine
passion, but also with humanity and clear-sighted, lucid argument. Some of the problems are structural (I was
astonished to learn the detail of how Magistrates are selected and
"trained", for example) but a great deal of it is because the system
is being appallingly overloaded while being starved of the resources to do the
job by a state "arrogant in the assumption that those hardest hit are
those for whom public sympathy will never register on opinion polls."
It's easy to read in that the prose and style are excellent,
but the content is a very tough read indeed.
We all need to be aware of the issues, though, because the very fairness
of our society depends on a decent, fair criminal justice system which the
author currently characterises (fairly, as far as I can see) as in the main,
"getting numbers through the door and out again as inexpensively and
swiftly as possible. It's roulette framed
as justice…"
I was surprised and impressed by how fascinating and
involving I found The Secret Barrister, and I can recommend it very warmly.
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