Letting victims down
I spent yesterday conducting the defence in a magistrates' court trial. This is something of a novelty for me as I rarely venture into mags court trials, although I do a lot of other hearings there. I just don't like them, they can be very informal and law is often an irrelevancy if you happen to find yourself before an inexperienced bench/advisor. Yesterdays trial was a long one and, contrary to what I have just said, very heavy on the law. I have about 6 legal rulings noted in my book given by the magistrates at some point yesterday. Even though I am contradicting what I said just a moment ago, each one of the legal arguments was complicated but each one of the rulings was detailed, to the point and correct (including the ones I lost). In the end, I won the trial. I shouldn't have won though. At the start of the day the evidence against me was overwhelming, in my opinion. However, the police and CPS seemed to be conspiring together to let ...