10th January 2022
The acquittal of the Colston Four became a significant political issue – so significant that former ministers and government supporters even got to the point of dissing juries altogether.
But where was the best legal commentary – to explain what did (and did not) happen?
On state broadcasters?
On news sites?
No.
It was on social media – in particular, two blogposts done by barristers in their spare time.
One was this explanatory post by the Secret Barrister.
The other was on the blog of Matthew Scott: the actual directions to the jury.
Neither of these barristers had to do this – they volunteered to put this information into the public domain.
Neither of the bloggers did anything that could not be done by a well-resourced legal correspondent at a mainstream news site.
But there are very few legal correspondents anywhere in mainsteam media, and they would not have the time (or the editorial freedom) to provide such information for free to anyone on the internet.
The Secret Barrister and Matthew Scott provide not only an important public service but also fill a gap in what should (and is not) being provided to the public generally by news sites.
We are lucky to have them – and, given the ever-starker limitations on news budgets – we must cherish this volunteerism by legal professionals.
But what happens when such volunteerism comes to an end, for it is no longer viable for legal professionals?
Well.
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The Secret Barrister also provided a good explanation in the Sunday Times.
My initial inclination was that a conviction was probably justified. However, the Secret Barrister’s analysis persuaded me otherwise – and he did not take sides.
Absolutely right. Mathew Scott a good friend in my chambers and the secret barrister are offering hey superb independent legal service and we should be proud of them. Nigel Pascoe and QC
Agreed. Both were excellent – there is simply no criticism of the case anywhere which was not already addressed by SB’s blog. Sadly, that includes Jonathan Sumption, a man who simply should know better.
I think Sumption’s comments are fine – they are about the general system. Think of the victims of rape or of dangerous driving who don’t get justice because of the jury system. I don’t think he was conditionally salty about this thing for political reasons, and it’s pretty consistent with his general outlook.
For these reasons I think he shouldn’t be lumped in with those whose objections are just they don’t like the answer
Thank you VERY much for linking to these two blogs. The Secret Barrister was certainly a very clear presentation of the questions to be determined, which made it much easier to understand the posting of the Judge’s Summing Up.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a complete Summing Up before: it was, to me, a very impressive presentation of the issues to be decided. So these posts had the unusual effect of increasing my respect for lawyers generally and even judges in particular.
Ta for the links; really excellent third-party posts. Being exposed to so much calm logic makes me feel optimistic about the world again. Cf. the tendency towards cynicism after over-exposure to the usual rhetorical poppycock from politicians.
Agreed both are great.
But it’s not like they get nothing out of investing the time.
When (not if) Adam Wagner takes silk, it will be in large part because of the unpaid hours he invested publicising and summarising the innumerable waves of Coronavirus regulations since March 2020.
If a barrister has a spare moment, it is good business sense to invest time blogging about legal matters.
Do juries always get directions like this? Seems very clear cut. I’m an IT guy and the pathway seems very algorithmic. Much to be admired.
Pretty much. They are shaped by a lot of Court of Appeal cases.
That said this was the first I’d seen reflection the decision in Ziegler. But it seemed to completely misrepresent it to me. Does anyone know if there have already been judgements on this? Is there any analysis on this? Nobody has mentioned it
I have followed the Secret Barrister for some time and find his comments to be extremely clear and well judged. Wasn’t aware of Mathew Scott but will read his blogs too – we need their honest and sincere experience especially in these days where we appear to have both a Lord Chief Justice and Attorney General whom are both compromised and biased.
One of the problems is the declining circulation and therefore the presentation, albeit in simplified form, of legal issues in what remains of the UK’s local and regional press. In my youth most regional newspapers had their crime correspondent down at the local Crown Court, (many have since closed of course), who would alert readers to legal issues raised during trial. Nowadays even most national papers have long dispensed with full time hands on journalists who understood the issues and could convey them to the public. I have in mind people such as Martin Brunt of Sky TV. Sadly, social media does not fill this lacuna.
I could not agree more, David. It’s very heartening for people to remember that the law is not just about ‘the length of the chancellor’s foot’, nor what the loudest political voices demand, but is a disciplined approach to resolving disputes and deciding whether rules have been broken or not. The Secret Barrister is always admirable, and that summing up was one of the most reassuring things I’ve read for a long time.
I am not a lawyer, and without your help, and that of Secret Barrister and Matthew Scott would be very puzzled by such apparently “perverse” verdicts. If I were the Attorney General (!) I like to think I’d ask a QC to explain things to me. So, my thanks to you all for letting me understand what is going on.
But it’s just another part of the general (wilful?) ignorance among politicians and commentators, ready to spout off about things they really don’t understand.
Here, we see it all the time with the Northern Ireland Protocol; it can only be a deliberate decision to misunderstand what it is really about. No matter how often this is explained to some people, they repeat their original assertations.
I’m not sure how this has arisen. Perhaps a lack of education, more likely a willingness to slavishly follow an ideology, particularly one which emphasises “populism”. And I’m equally uncertain what the cure is.
David,
This comment ISN’T intended for publication: Write to me privately if you would like me to provide more detail about practical work for your consideration.
I feel the pain you express, and I can pay you in something more than gratitude: my time. I am willing to do the technical work for you that will create a mechanism that facilitates making your work here pay in cash too, and I hope, go towards righting some more general wrongs.
I am a member of the ‘dark profession’ and can assure you that the public understanding of what we deal with is even murkier than that of the law. Furthermore, the fact of the dismal state of public understanding with respect to information technology is extremely dangerous. There really is no reason to doubt that failure of the technological edifice I contemplate in horror, would put our cities back under the trees. I am extremely skeptical of the extraordinary confidence people place in it given that it didn’t even exist when I should have been at university, and grows exponentially in size and complexity.
We are absolute beginners in many respects, but we do understand engineering in a generalised form. There is a growing chorus of dissent to do with the well understood principle that centralised highly evolved systems are brittle. The difficulty is that they are extraordinarily profitable. Five companies that were born a long time after me, make more money than the UK GDP in a year, and have a pile of a trillion dollars in cash. Space rockets are pocket change for the boss.
But those systems are very, very brittle. You may have, for a single example, noticed a global scale outage caused by simple single user error last year. I think we got more of an “oops” than a sorry. I guess the engineers whose clever water management systems worked so well that Angkor Watt outgrew their capacity, probably just shrugged too, if they hadn’t already made for the hills.
Much, much, worse is both possible, and increasingly likely with the passage of time. The solution – decentralisation – was ALWAYS the way the engineers wanted to build the internet. It is greed in cooperation with government power building that kettled the world into pens so dangerously.
We haven’t been idle, and we are having encouraging results bootstrapping a strange new network system that looks a lot more like biology than the hub and spoked wheel that is the internet. (It’s called IPFS if you would like to read about it).
I am using a Brave browser that supports IPFS. It pays me 2/3rds of the advertising revenue that Brave charges advertisers for serving me unobtrusive un-targeted notifications. I, and other users, give part of that back to content creators like you. The Guardian is on board while the paywallers aren’t – go figure. It so happens that Brave circumvents some of types of paywall quite effectively: it’s a side effect of disabling the snooping technologies that power them. I smile at the way the Economist, a very well written newspaper that uses every intrusive web technology known to humanity, looks like one of Canute’s courtiers in this light.
It’s all looks very Robin Hood to Google’s sheriff of Nottingham – it is after all Googles redirected revenue stream that underpins Brave’s currency. No laws are broken, although I am sure some people would like it to make it illegal for me to keep my own information private.
There is another fact that makes the discussion more than academically interesting to the legal profession: In an IPFS enabled world, censorship is no longer technically possible and nor is information destruction once it is ‘in the wild’. Part of the purpose of the technology is to prevent another Alexandria incident, and it is demonstrably effective in preventing Armenian holocaust denial by Turkish government censorship efforts :) It takes little imagination to see how that fact will cause tears too, and could easily render entire bodies of law obsolete in practice.
Let me know if you are interested in getting behind the train. Thank you again for your work.
Hear, hear! Though I was pleased to see that The Secret Barrister had a good article in the Sunday Times last weekend.