In this third episode of Criminal Justice Matters, the podcast series from the Criminal Bar Association of England and Wales, we consider the impact on criminal barristers trying to hold an underfunded system together.
Mary Prior KC, Chair of the CBA together with James Gray, CBA Treasurer, and guests draw on their experience to illustrate the personal toll on criminal barristers as they struggle to maintain the excellence expected in every case.
We hear more from Paul, who (as we learned in Episode 2) spent four years on bail awaiting trial. He speaks of how he relied on his defence counsel to hold both his case and his emotional stability together during the years when his life was put on hold.
We hear from Paula who tells us of her experience at Court: how she arrived only to cross paths with her assailant in the court car park before both were due to give evidence; how she was told at the last minute that she was expected to give evidence in a certain way; how she was left without any real guidance.
The former Resident Judge at Leeds Crown Court, Peter Collier KC explains some of the reasons barristers are leaving the field of criminal law. He makes the link between the Government’s decision to cut funding forcing available court rooms to close, the throughput of trials to slow, the availability work to shrink and the cases to pile up.
The current backlog of criminal cases stands at over 70,000, more than double the backlog of just 33,000 at the start of 2019. Since the recording of this episode, the new Government has announced further restrictions on court sitting days meaning fewer court rooms working in 2024 -2025 and an increased backlog. Cases are now being listed in 2027 and waits of six years from alleged offence to trial are not uncommon.
Psychotherapist Wendy Showell-Nicholas provides analysis on how work at the criminal Bar can lead to vicarious trauma in criminal barristers as they soak up the details from back-to-back cases involving serious sexual and violent offences comes with an unsustainable cost to our profession and the wider criminal justice system.
The extra pressures placed on criminal barristers by an under-funded Crown Prosecution Service is discussed by Jonathan Dunne, a criminal barrister with over 30 years’ experience prosecuting and defending cases involving serious sexual and violent offences.
Justice matters to us. Extended delays cause misery and hardship for every participant and the toll can be overwhelming.
The price we all pay for an under funded criminal bar is a criminal justice system shorn of properly qualified, sufficiently experienced legal representation. Or as we see increasingly week by week, no counsel at all available to prosecute or defend a case, or both, on the day it is due to start.
As our Chair Mary Prior KC concludes “Anyone can be accused of a crime and anyone can be the victim of a crime. If you find yourself in that position or you find one of your loved ones is in that position, you want a system that works, that gets your case dealt with within a reasonable time, in a reasonably fitted court building, and by the best barristers that there are.”
Join us as we continue a real-life journey through criminal justice – because #CriminalJusticeMatters.
Criminal Justice Matters is produced on behalf of the Criminal Bar Association by Adam Batstone Media & Communications.
For any further information on issues raised in this series contact
James Rossiter
CBA director of Communications