Rebel Justice
What is justice? Who does it serve? Why should you care?
When we think about justice, we think about it as an abstract, something that happens to someone else, somewhere else. But justice and the law regulate every aspect of our interactions with each other, with organisations, and with the government.
We never think about it until it impacts our lives, or that of someone close.
Our guests are women with lived experience of the justice system whether as victims or women who have committed crimes; or people at the forefront of civic action who put their lives on the line to demand a better world..
We ask them to share their insight into how we might repair a broken and harmful system, with humanity and dignity.
We also speak with people who are in the heart of the justice system creating important change; climate activists, judges, barristers, human rights campaigners, mental health advocates, artists and healers.
Rebel Justice
101. Behind the Wigs: Life at the Criminal Bar. Kate Kelleher Part 2.
The courtroom looks orderly from the gallery, but behind the wigs and gowns is a profession running on grit, late nights, and vending machines. We sit down with criminal defense barrister Kate Kelleher and the Criminal Bar Association’s James Rosseter to reveal how the Criminal Bar keeps fairness alive while the system strains at every seam.
Kate maps the quiet collapse of camaraderie since the pandemic: fewer juniors, downsized chambers, and loose networks that used to provide feedback, mentorship, and the small kindness of a post‑trial debrief. James connects these human shifts to structural problems, understaffed teams, equipment failures, and disclosure errors that still derail trials decades after notorious miscarriages of justice. The stories range from judges’ dinners that changed careers to real cases halted when phone data surfaced late, and to the absurdity of hunting a treasury tag while a jury waits. Small details, no café, no time, no space to talk, compound into big risks for fair trials.
We explore the emotional toll the public rarely sees: flashbacks that intrude at bedtime, the discipline to avoid alcohol during trial, and the recurring fear of not being able to protect one’s own child in a police station. Kate draws a vital line between legal guilt and religious or moral guilt, reminding us that beyond a reasonable doubt is more than a phrase, it is the standard that protects us all. With local court reporting fading, the everyday work of justice disappears from view, leaving only sensational headlines and thin narratives. What gets lost is the humanity of people who still show up, hungry and exhausted, to make sure no stone is left unturned.
If you care about justice reform, open courts, the Criminal Bar, and the real mechanics of fair trials, this conversation is your front-row seat. Subscribe, share, and leave a review to help more listeners find stories that show how justice actually works, and how it can work better.
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Produced by Henry Chukwunyerenwa
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If you're listening to Rebel Justice, the podcast from The View magazine. When we think about justice, we think about it as an abstract, something that happens to someone else or somewhere else. But justice and the law regulate every aspect of our interactions with each other, with organizations, and with the government. We never think about it until it impacts our lives or those of someone close. Our guests are women with lived experience of the justice system. Whether as victims or women who have committed crimes, people at the forefront of civic action who put their lives on the line to demand a better world. We ask them to share their insight into how we might repair a broken and harmful system with humanity and dignity. We also speak with people who are in the heart of the justice system, creating important change. Judges, barristers, human rights campaigners, mental health advocates, artists and healers. In part one, we explore the emotional and psychological toll of working within the criminal justice system, the weight of trauma that sits quietly behind every case. In the second episode, The Life of a Barrister, we continue our conversation with Kate Kelleher, a criminal defence barrister at the 36th group, with over 25 years of experience at the bar, and James Rosseter, Director of Communications at the Criminal Bar Association. Together, they'll pull back the curtain on what life really looks like behind the wigs and gowns, the long hours, the loneliness that's crept into the profession since the pandemic, the dwindling support networks, and the day-to-day realities of a justice system under pressure. From lost camaraderie and chambers to late-night case prep, and even the small comforts, like chocolate and vending machine lunches, this is an honest and sometimes funny, but deeply sobering look at what it means to keep the system going when it's stretched to its limits.
James Rossiter:This idea of what we're expected to and not and not to do, dealing with those people after court. What's changed, do you think, even the last three or four years, about the ability to discuss these cases back in chambers with your colleagues as opposed to now? Where do you do you discuss these cases? Totally uh non-existent.
Kate Kelleher:Nowhere, nowhere at all to discuss them. Well, I don't find them. There are some drinks events, but if I am at home and I live in South West London, I'm 45 minutes to an hour away from here. And so because of lockdown and otherwise, we ended up as very solitary humans where we used to be very chatty humans. Um there's a lot of WhatsApp chat. Which is not the same as meeting someone in person, is it? It's not, it's not, and I in fact was hoping to see a friend today who said, I'm in the middle, my trial's running on, I'm in the middle, I really can't stop. And it genuinely was for a cup of tea and a ketchup, you know, and I have not seen her since she took silk and I attended her party when a load of other people were there as well. So we're now in October. I haven't seen her since the summer, and she would be my touchstone. I would she is the person that I would ask, you know, can I just run something past you? What do you think about this? Um, and is certainly within chambers here. I just joined in 2018, so I was still a relatively new member when the pandemic hit and there was that total shutdown. So I don't feel as if I have that relationship with anybody in chambers. I tend to go back to people that I knew that I was called to the bar with and things like that. There are one or two very good junior members here who are chatty. Uh, but yeah, that's for me is gone.
James Rossiter:I think, I mean, we've looked at this, if I you can give the how you've seen it on the ground. We started seeing this long before COVID with the pressures of court work. And we are short, without giving the propaganda piece, it's just a fact. We we are down by anything between 10 and 25% in terms of numbers compared to a decade ago. About a quarter fewer junior criminal barristers between eight and twenty-two years called that's a sort of engine room as well, that's what we caught talk about. And certainly silks are down 10% or so. At a time now when the the volume of your cases has reached back exactly to where we were 10 years ago. So at that perfect storm, but even 2018-2019, uh, as Kate said, you you you might get an email from the court 5:30, 6 o'clock. We've moved your case, we found space, it's tomorrow. Oh, I can't do it. Someone else in chambers will pick up, and you're juggling all the others. Uh, people were going into chambers less. Chambers were reducing because it's a fixed cost, it comes out of the earnings, it's not subsidized of every barrister, and so many were reducing their footprint, and that only accelerated after COVID. The bit that concerns me is I was saddened when you said I hadn't even got time to talk to anyone because the only time I notice people talking about cases is in the so-called robing room, the private area where you do your homework at court, but you're so busy preparing for that case. Very few conversations happen.
Kate Kelleher:Very few. Very few now. Uh, I don't feel that camaraderie that I did feel when I joined the bar 25 years ago.
James Rossiter:No. That is a problem because it's it's the soft issues of learning. What do you do? How do you deal with such and such judge? Kate mentioned you might have dined with your peers. You might have actually dined with a with your judge on a case after a case. There's little time for that. It's really important to discuss. Yes. You know, I think your advocacy could be improved in this way or not, in a friendly way.
Kate Kelleher:Yes, I'm smiling now because I've just recalled a judge's dinner they're called at the end of a trial. And my client was uh absolutely hopeless and um ultimately convicted. But the judge was quite um annoyed with me by the end of the trial, not least because of my client's antics. Anyway, so at the judge's dinner, we were walking in, and you know, uh the judge had already arrived, and he was sitting with his drink, and it was this most beautiful restaurant up in Lancashire. Occasionally happens that we can eat. And so first pastor walked in, it was a multi-hander, there were many of us there, and he was saying, Oh, please call me X, and oh, please call me X. And I went in and I said, Good evening, Judge, and he meant good evening. I was the only person that had entire dinner that had to say judge. Everybody else was on first name terms. And I remember then going up to another courtroom in north of England, and he transferred and he was the same judge, and I thought, oh my god. Anyway, at the end of that, though, he did call me and he said, It strikes me that you're willing to take the difficult cases that nobody else does, because this was quite hopeless too, wasn't it? But he did finish by saying, if you ever need a reference, call me because I've now realised that it's not you, it's your client. You know, it was it was the nice in the in a way, it was backhand compliment. But if I hadn't had that judge's dinner after the first trial, I probably never would have had that conversation after the second trial. And I do think that judge's dinners are very important.
James Rossiter:And that is so important because if you're not able to discuss aspects of I've been in those discussions, we've all been in those discussions. I remember one up in um uh uh up in Northampton discussing with another former chair of this chambers, Mary Pryor, and without giving away the case, it was discussion how would she sum up, we were discussing with her junior and the solicitor, what tone would work. Really important because the facts are the same, but what emphasis would work with this particular jury? Because you have to read what's going on. Now, that team was able to bounce ideas off each other, and second guess, someone on the other side, who happened to be another former chair of the Kumba, I mean, excellent advocates, but they played out the different ways that they'd sum up. And it was very interesting what they chose, and it worked. I won't say what the outcome was, it was as good as you could get. Now, but there's no one else in court but your peers to look at your I hate the word performance, the way uh your advocacy. Absolutely. That's what you're judged on in the end.
Kate Kelleher:Absolutely, but you'd have been lost in that conversation if you weren't in that courtroom. You wouldn't have been able to ask your peers because they weren't sitting in the courtroom and able to take a look at the jury either, you know?
James Rossiter:But going back to this idea of the memory, you know, and you remember that case bit by bit. I remember another session before again long before COVID on this, then it was a new word of well-being. We had uh Chatham House rules, we had um former members of the criminal bar who just joined the bench judiciary. And one was uh been on the bench for a couple of years, and one was well known, been on for 10 years, not particularly liked by by members of the of the bar, thought that he that that judge was a little stern. And the more new member of the bench said, Do you know one of the reasons I joined the bench? I just had enough of tucking my daughter into bed. I'd done 25 years of violent and sexual offence cases, or both, all in one. And at certain points, those images came to me as I was tucking my child up, and I thought, what am I doing? Oh yeah. And it suddenly dawned on me that there was everyone suffered at some point from the flashback, and you have to contain it.
Kate Kelleher:Absolutely. The flashbacks are just horrendous, and they come to you at the most odd times. And what do you do? How do you cope with them? Um, I I just put them, I I recognize them for what they are. I think that's all you can do is recognize them for what they are. But when my children were very young, I used to have a recurring nightmare that one of my children was arrested, wrongly accused of a crime. Of course, I believed that as a parent anyway. But the trauma that I used that used to wake me is that they would the police would not let me in to see my child in the police station, and then I could not get hold of any good solicitor to represent my child. And I should say that I'm dual qualified, that I funded myself through unfunded pupillage 25 years ago by representing at the police station at night. So I am an accredited police station representative as well. So I was fully aware of, and I am fully aware, of what goes on in the police station, of what a 10, 12, 14-year-old child will go through when they are arrested.
James Rossiter:And so this dream, and I'm not going to do the crude Freudian analysis, but it sounds like there's a reality of what happens, and perhaps a fear, not just that you might not in your dream find representation, but you're just it's a it's a lot to keep up with your home life and work life. Who's looking after your family? Who's looking after you? No, well, nobody. Nobody. And that's that's a tough one, which we all face. Oh, absolutely. Chocolate helps. At least you're on chocolate, not wine.
Kate Kelleher:We I we I blame Terry's chocolate orange. I would be so felt like if they hadn't reduced that to bar size. If it was if it had remained one big, huge ball of orange, I would not have bought it.
James Rossiter:You think they're doing shelf pick uh arrangements around the courts? Because I have noticed just yesterday the Terry chocolate orange got a new salted caramel flavour. I think Baxter's have a real sharkaholic.
Kate Kelleher:It's not, it's because there are no cafes in the courts. There are very few cafes in the courts, and those that are run, they only run certain amounts of food early on so that there is no food wastage, and the people who are running these meager cafes aren't losing out and not making money. And so the lunch of the criminal barrister, by the time you've finished in court, you the break is between one and two. You then have to go and speak to your client, explains what has happened in the morning session, what's about to happen in the afternoon session, explain if the judge has ordered that something happens, that you've got to go and speak to the prosecutor. And the fact that you may be seen laughing with the prosecutor does not mean that you are disrespecting their case. You're just lightening the mood. And if your client is in custody, you then have to wait for them to be fed, and the cells will let you in at maybe half past one or a quarter to two when you have to be back before the judge and the jury at two o'clock. Let me assure you, cafe is not happening because you can't cue, you can't do anything, and all you get is the vending machine of crisps and chop.
James Rossiter:And you're assuming, yes, there's a so this is a it sounds small, but it's absolutely fundamental. We talk about work well-being, basic working conditions. We're assuming there's a cafe in the private area of the so-called robing room. Most of those have gone. It's a luxury if they are, and again, they run out, at least there's privacy to discuss your case. Then for many courts, Snaresbrook, 20 courtrooms, the largest of the country. It's actually the largest courthouse in Europe. In Europe, and there's only one public cafe, and we all scrubble around this corridor, and you know what, you get a choice of a sausage roll. If you're lucky, a ginsters, I know them well because I love, I've got now an addiction for rubbish food, but mostly most people are on muffins, and you know, you're queuing, you could be queuing, this happens in London, you could be queuing with the jury. I was once at a terrible grooming case.
Kate Kelleher:There's only that little stand-up cafe, standalone little position in inner London.
James Rossiter:Yes, it's a little booth.
Kate Kelleher:Yes, and you can go across the road to an extortionally priced place where you can get half a sandwich for about ten minutes.
James Rossiter:So if you go down to Inner London, you'll see people in gowns, if they kept they haven't had time to take them off, walking in to get a thing because they don't want to be in the same queue as the jury, a defendant that might be in a grooming case. I that was one of the things that happened to me lately. We'd all been there. The other, but the but the other point you mentioned is um imagine there's no caf, there's some no cafe at all. Of any coffee, no broker, and you have to go out of the court. Have you got time even to go out now? That's that's such a good point. Have you got time? No. No, and then we go hungry. What about colleagues on a group? I was just uh dealing with this just two nights ago. I said, I just had my my lunch at 4:30 again, and she said she replied finally at seven, just had my breakfast. Because she didn't have time for breakfast. What's going on? You know, 7:30. So it's a problem. So thank goodness we're on chocolate because it used to be wine, but um I there's I didn't say it wasn't wine and chocolate.
Kate Kelleher:Not during court hours. Oh my god, absolutely not. I'd never drink actually now because the whole thing is so tense now, yeah, and everybody is so pushed for time and pushed for explanation and pushed for explaining that it's not the same as you see on TV.
James Rossiter:It's really not.
Kate Kelleher:And the hours lost explaining that it's not as you see on TV, is that I never um drink now, once the jury is sworn, until I've done my closing speech. Yeah, we've all had We just cannot afford to lose that concentration even for half a night. You cannot. Yeah, it's just just such pressure.
James Rossiter:You know, it's funny because when there is those chambers drinks, funnily enough, in this we had some drinks here after a meeting, and I was thinking, gosh, it's been since July. July. What's going on?
Kate Kelleher:For us, it's a release of tension, it's a chance to speak to somebody else who has seen the images we've seen, who have dealt with the stories we deal with on a daily basis. And so, yes, I see that. I actually see that in my daughter who's just started a new job and very excited about the social element, but also very excited about her job and people including her and everything. And I am pleased for her because I think I've done a good job in guiding my children. Neither of them are in law.
James Rossiter:And I think here's a fundamental thing is some basics. Chambers is a shared workplace, everyone's self-employed. We are not employees. It's uh you know, I started out as a solicitor in a city firm back dating me in the early 90s, and they are even then they're a light years ahead of where we are now. But it helps because there's staff. You go into a workplace, you have a duty of care. Uh chambers do as much as they can as a shared workplace, but at the end of the day, you're self-employed.
Kate Kelleher:And we're just coming and going, we're picking up the papers, we need to read them, you know, and yes, we will have a chance to sit down and chat, but at the back of our minds is what's in those papers, what's awaiting me, what has somebody else missed? You know, and there is that because people are pressurized. For example, last year I did a case which I picked up, returned from another chambers, and it turns out that it was this kid's third listing for trial. The first time the jury had been discharged, the second time it was abandoned because even though people had already given evidence, there was suddenly a realization that the court didn't have any more time. And here he was on his third listing, where it had been transferred into the Bailey from one of the other courts. I can't remember which one, but I remember him being totally scared being at the Bailey. And he had waited so long, it was something like five years, of an accusation of dealing in drugs, where he admitted class B cannabis, but was totally denying all the other class A and otherwise that he was accused of. And I remember looking through the phone. Evidence and the prosecutor is saying to me, We've been through this, we've had a disclosure, everything. And I said, I don't think you have. So I had to wait until the officer in the case went into the witness box. And then I asked the questions. At which point the officer in the case said, No, that exercise has never been done. And the judge interjected and said, Well, if that is the case, you better go and answer it properly. And the following day, the crown offered no evidence. All that weight. All that weight, all that wasted trial time, everything for lack of disclosure and lack of somebody actually looking at the evidence. And I remember the solicitor saying, I can't believe this has been through three counsel now before this has come. And that wasn't, I didn't think that was particularly fair either, because the response I had gotten from the prosecution was that the exercise had been conducted and it had been done. And so, you know, we are, we need to be able to take our word for things. It is very much an honor system. It may be adversarial, but our overriding duty when we are sworn as barristers is never to knowingly mislead a court and to uphold the law. And so that is in danger of being lost, of people taking the word of other people because there is no time. By the time the trial comes to court and suddenly first barrister on it is no longer available. It is a nightmare scenario.
James Rossiter:Without giving away by the time this is broadcast, we've probably shared some figures I'm going through right now on this issue. And disclosure for listeners who don't know is what it says. Sharing evidence, and if it's called unused, which might not be relied on the prosecution, but you have a duty as a prosecution to hand it to the defence, even though you might not rely on it. And those those basic requirements go right back what to the IRA cases, to all the Guilford 4. So we don't have these miscarriages. They, this uh uh inability to, or as it's defined, a failure to disclose unused evidence by the prosecution, they the numbers have been rising for the last year each quarter, and that's what I'm looking at now. Now that is symptomatic of under I'm sorry to talk about this, it's just a fact of of underfunding and lack of people at the CPS. But it going back to the human trauma, it puts enormous pressure on the criminal barrister who turns up both the prosecution and the defence, because the defence will turn up and go, are we sure we've got it? It's no one necessarily at fault. The prosecution barrister may be an instructor that day and has to find out. Oh, we did, he said to me, yeah. Yeah, and we I was at a case like this um where someone from this chambers I went to put her in, was sitting on the bench, and it's just a long time, James, and we watched in a nice regional court, it was a rape trial day two. We've been waiting a good couple of years to come on. Suddenly there's all this phone material that hadn't been disclosed. We had to adjourn it's 30 pages, and we go off and we couldn't even find, believe it or not, a a what are those called, those little uh bits of string that tie people together? Oh tag, treasury tag. A treasury tag, and we still use them. So a little bit of treasury tag, something to h to turn it over because we needed pieces of paper because Were you allowed for security reasons to hand out security a treasury tag? Oh, maybe that was it, they were too sharp.
Kate Kelleher:Yes, yeah.
James Rossiter:But we so there was a pencil situation where jury, you know, was sent out for half an hour, and we were trying to find the treasury tag, the stationary, so that jury could see the new bundle of the afternoon. Ridiculous. That you know, and I I I you can see I'm lost the words.
Kate Kelleher:It was so cryingly awful uh to think we're that short of even the stationary having had much worse, it's£10 a page if uh anybody for the defense needs the court to photocopy to discourage it.
James Rossiter:To discourage it. So we're dealing with all those things. In fact, in one of the messages the chair uh real Carmi Jones has put out last week, we put out these messages to the CBA. We covered at the end the number of trials ineffective, those that are scheduled for one or two years in advance, or now we're looking at four years, and on the day, everyone's waiting because of courtroom uh failures. It's courtroom and equipment failures.
Kate Kelleher:I had a sentence the other day, uh it's short sentence, uh not the worst offence in the world, you know, everybody lived. Uh, somebody's, you know, ego was a bit dented, but an offence had occurred. And it was supposed to be listed for sentence for just one hour, and the court couldn't accommodate it, so it's been moved to the 3rd of November. A date I can't do, but the court can, and so I won't be there because I'll be in Leeds. Yeah, and so there is that as well. That you I've got to tell a young person that having represented them throughout for over a year, waiting to get to this point because it didn't go to trial as he pleaded in the end, uh, that I won't be there at the final hurdle.
James Rossiter:That human aspect. In fact, I've only I just clicked, listen to Kate on that today, that human aspect of being there for sentence. I picked it up ten days ago. I look at sadly, nerdily, I look at court lists that see trends. And one of the worst the other week, or best, whatever you describe, 40, 40 hearings were in the when the equivalent of what they could call court 99. It's like room 101. You lift the trap door, they disappear. 40, 40 in one day listed for adjournment between one week and two weeks. You think you and I was thinking that's bad enough. But they were sentencing dozens.
Kate Kelleher:And of course, that is a real human that's a real I want to know my fate for what I have done.
James Rossiter:And that was just in one quarter. And but we still love it, don't we? Yeah.
Kate Kelleher:We still love what we do, we got moaning away. Absolutely, yeah. There are days when I don't love it anymore.
James Rossiter:Right.
Kate Kelleher:What one are the things that set you off? Is it the most Well, it's just the the delay, the lack of human empathy, the tick box exercises, the analysis, well, the computer says no, the computer says medium risk, you know, these sort of things. The computer says high risk. What do you mean by you know, when you're working out whether or not somebody is likely to reinvent pre-sentence reports, meetings with probation officers. I had one recently where the probation officer said that they'd had three meetings with them. I saw the client and he said, no, the first time we had a chat about how I was doing, how I was getting on, what TV programs I was watching, etc., uh, because there was only 15 or 20 minutes left. The second time he was late and there was only five minutes left. And I have to tell you, Kate, that I didn't bother turning up for the third one because I thought, what is it? And yet this report said some three times.
James Rossiter:And that's the issue, isn't it? It's these non-sexy hearings, the bits that aren't the trials. The twent 20% of the hearings in the backlog are not trials.
Kate Kelleher:It's a pre-trial preparation hearing, fondly known to the defence as the pressure to plead hearing. Okay, because it carries an automatic discount on sentence if you plead at the first available hearing. Of course, that's being shaved back now because apparently the first available hearing is when you have the duty solicitor down the magistrates court who's got about 15 other cases. The um prosecution haven't put all the papers together yet, and yet you get 33% there. And now at the Crown Court, if your case is committed to the Crown Court for trial, you only get 23%.
James Rossiter:Yeah, so by the time you get to your pretrial plea hearing, people don't realise the opportunity to plea is is squandered.
Kate Kelleher:And yet there's no time down the magistrates to deal with anything.
James Rossiter:And so those bits wear at us and yet we stick at it.
Kate Kelleher:Because I'd like to know that if my child was in trouble, there would be somebody like me there at the court door waiting for them. That regardless of the exhaustion of the demotivation, of the desperately seeking a nice cup of coffee somewhere by two o'clock, five to two. All those things I would like to know that there's somebody like me that will ensure that before somebody is convicted, that no stone is left unturned, that the evidence has been looked at and checked. And what we do have to remember, I always remember saying this to somebody when he had a cast iron defence. I mean, he had such a good defence, and he said, Oh, I feel so guilty, I feel so guilty. And of course, with this accent, you can guess that I'm 100% Catholic. Um, I said to him, you know, you've got to go see a priest. And he said, What do you mean? And I said, Because there is a big difference between religious guilt and legal guilt. So when judges say, well, he knows what he did, yes, he knows what he did, but did he mean to do it? You know what there is a big difference, and we have to remember that that we really do have a great system, great system that says we will not find you guilty unless we are sure that you are, you know, and better nine guilty men go free than one innocent is deprived of their liberty. And we should not forget those words spoken many years ago.
James Rossiter:I think the public only woke up to it again. It was not this summer, it was the summer before, was it two summers ago that Malkinson the Yes, that was the start of it. Then we've had, is it Sullivan, that gentleman, Sullivan?
Kate Kelleher:38 years in custody?
James Rossiter:And and I think it is awful and terrible, these people who've been accused and convicted of crimes that you commit. Exactly. It came exactly a year at Malkinson after the hysteria over the nurse, Lucy Leppby, who has been convicted, whatever it says, and that's what the jury has decided, is the jury decides is right. But the hysteria runs about, yes, and then people forget that they may be someone else sitting in prison wrongly convicted. We would be, do you know what? We, if you look at Google Channel 4, Angela Rafti now sits at the Bailey. 2017 or 18, must have been 2018, January 18, she said, We worry about the number of people who have been falsely imprisoned, the CPS are in denial. That was long before this all came out, going back to disclosure after the Liam Allen case. Yeah, just unbelievable.
Kate Kelleher:I mean, there was a case recently collapsed because the defendant had raised as part of his issue, I mean, it went off, it was adjourned, but part of his issue, he had raised certain aspects in the defence, and it was only three days into the trial that it emerged that in fact the prosecution had that evidence, which would may not, may or may not have assisted his defence, may or may not have led to his acquittal, but what it was is that it was there and the defendant told them that evidence was there, you know, and nobody had bothered because a pat answer a lot of police officers give now is well, yes, there was that line of inquiry, but it wasn't economically sound in the circumstances of the case. And of course, you can see people in the jury thinking, oh God, is it really going to cost all that money to check whether he's innocent or not? Well, they wouldn't have charged him if he wasn't. And it's that thing if they wouldn't have charged him if he wasn't. I remember once getting pulled up by a police officer for gesticulating at somebody in the car. And he said, I saw you. I said, Well, clearly, officer, you didn't see what he did first. I said, Because this is what he did, then he drove like a madman towards the traffic lights, then he slammed on his brakes, tried to force me to crash into the back of him, then started laughing and gesticulating at me. So, yes, why don't you speak to him and double check what he did? Because you actually didn't see everything. And, you know, people make this presumption that what they saw is enough, which goes back to what I say about you need to scratch the surface, you need to read beyond the headline, you need to think.
James Rossiter:But do you think what we're talking about here is right back to the beginning? Is it's I don't know if traumatizing is too strong a word, but it's extremely distressing. Uh, the lack of understanding of what actually goes on in a courtroom, of what we do, what judges do to make sure there's fair questioning, all the safeguards, and so on and so on. It's a huge responsibility for us to, why should it be us, to explain what goes on? And often it's left to us without the resources when we're really just trying to deal with our own pay working conditions. So we spend so much of our time explaining the system. Exactly. And and it's not helped when it's actually weaponized. And we don't have the same system of selection. We are completely right. And but to the wider point you touched on about the you know the jury, uh one of the tasks that falls to me often, and you know, there's there's just up me between the communications, we are run on a shoestring, is is explaining how a jury works. And I've had to I've had to explain that more and more over the last few years. And one of the reasons is that we are all suff we're suffering, and the public is suffering, from the huge demise in local reporting. 80 to 90 percent of local papers simply don't exist compared to where they were 30 years ago. And those that do do not spend money on local court reporting. When we were growing up. Oh, that's right. Yeah, there's there's one guy at the Bailey, and apparently everybody could just watch him. Yeah, there's one at the Bailey and one at you'll know one in and one regional court. But you know when we were growing up, what brought you into law? I used to enjoy reading the Barnet Press, and before that, I can even remember whatever we read in Birmingham. You can tell by the accent from home, you know, there was the local local court reports, which were extremely interesting, even if they were just a local burglary or this, that, and the other. Now all we get is the high profile all the cases you described, a bit, I bet few of them have had any local media coverage. Very little.
Kate Kelleher:None, not at all. None at all, and very few. Then nobody reports an acquittal. No, nobody reports an acquittal that somebody was actually acquitted of what they were accused of.
James Rossiter:Obviously, very interesting, because from a news point of view, it's not a story. It's gotta be the biggest, the worst, the greatest. Unless it seems a tragedy they got acquitted and and and a political party says we there should be a retrial. There's got to be some trauma.
Host:That was The Life of a Barrister, the second part of our conversation with Kate Kelleher and James Rosseter. Through their stories, we've heard not only the immense professional and emotional strain faced by those working in the courts, but also the persistence and humour that keeps them going. If part one was about trauma, part two reminds us that justice isn't just a process, it's powered by people. You've been listening to Rebel Justice. If you'd like to support our work and receive four digital editions and one print issue a year, subscribe to The View for just£20. Make sure to follow us on our social media. We're on Instagram at the underscore view underscore magazines. And you can also find us on LinkedIn, X, and TikTok. If you'd like to reach out to us directly, you can email inquiries to us at press at theview magazine.org. Please share this story.