This seemed unnecessary and risks undermining the book’s central thesis if a real life example could not have been extracted from the barrister’s decade in practice.įor the public’s complacency, SB partly blames the criminal Bar itself, accepting that “for professional advocates, we do a strikingly bad job of explaining what we do or why it matters”. To reinforce the contention that anyone, even the author’s readers, could find themselves arrested, charged, wrongly convicted and imprisoned, with the consequent losses of job, relationships, reputation and freedom, the writer invents an injustice that befalls a fictional doctor. SB laments that the public do not feel invested in the system because they believe it does not directly affect them, luxuriating in the misplaced confidence that they will never be wrongly accused of a crime.

Or even know… If the criminal justice system were the NHS, it would never be off the front page.”Ī working criminal justice system is “essential to the peaceable democratic society”, serving to “protect the innocent, protect the public and protect the integrity, decency and humanity of our society”, the author writes. “What astounds me most is that people don’t seem to care. The “current state of our criminal justice system should terrify us” the author writes, whose raging against the machine is equalled only by astonishment at the “wall of silence” and “collective indifference” of the public to the parlous state of affairs. The book recounts everyday tales of injustice and a “culture of error” arising from avoidable failings by the underfunded and understaffed police and prosecution services, allowing “provably guilty people” to walk free. The author lays bare the result of the wrong-headed, short-sighted, politically expedient and dishonest drive to prosecute and defend on the cheap, warning that “we are moving from a criminal justice system to simply a criminal system”. With clarity and eloquence the 12 angry, passionate, frustrated chapters shout their unanimous and damning verdict on a system “close to breaking point”. The anonymous barrister, who since 2015 has in equal measure informed and entertained its almost 88,000 followers, has taken things a stage further, penning the much anticipated Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, which hit all good book stores this week. “The system is f***ed and nobody gives a s***” might be the tweet that sums up the Secret Barrister’s (SB) 343-page indictment on the damage wrought to the criminal justice system by successive penny-pinching governments.

The secret life of a barrister