Happy New Year For Some, Anyway by The Magistrates' Blog

Happy New Year - For Some, Anyway

written by The Magistrates' Blog on the 02^nd January 2014 at 10:24 - Posted in Police Blog

I arrived at court to find four Serco vans in the yard, with a fifth pulling in behind me. Fortunately they weren't all full, but we still had seventeen prisoners to deal with in one courtroom. The Prosecutor was one of the best ones who comes to our court, so I was pretty confident that we would get the job done by lunchtime.
The paperwork was all in order, but as usual we had to drink an extra cup of coffee while the two duty solicitors took instructions from their clients and gave appropriate advice before they came up the steel staircase. There were a few difficult ones, in particular a man in his forties who was either drunk or drugged, and who tried to tell us that we had got the law quite wrong, and by the way could we make an injunction against his landlord for illegally refusing to let him back into his rented bedsit. Another man refused to see a solicitor at all, and I had him confirm the fact in open court, before he suddenly changed his mind, so we sent him back downstairs. While he was down there he changed his mind yet again. There were a couple of breaches of bail (that is not an offence per se, but it allows the question of bail to be revisited, which quite often results in its being revoked or conditions made more onerous.
We saw, as we often do, the salutary effect that a night or two in the cells can have. One man had breached a bail condition not to contact his estranged wife, and been arrested as a result. We re-bailed him on the same conditions but I gave him a stern reminder that if this happened again he could wait for his trial date in Wormwood Scrubs. He firmly shook his head: " No sir, I have had enough.". We believed him, so he is out now, hopefully wiser than before.

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