Laws And Lawyers

Paul Mendelle, QC, is one of those barristers the public loves to hate. He defends the indefensible, those accused of rape, murder, unspeakable acts of cruelty. His last big case was acting for Baby P’s mother, Tracey Connelly.
He doesn’t find it easy. “I don’t know how people do what they do. I am also incredibly squeamish — I look at photographs of post mortems pretty quickly. But like doctors, barristers develop a professional way of dealing with things.” And, he adds, “behind every headline are flawed human beings. They’re never quite as portrayed.”
But he insists: “I don’t get guilty people off. I try to ensure, along with other barristers, that people who are not guilty are not convicted.” Prosecutors, he says, tend to be more detached. Mendelle also has a natural empathy with the underdog. “I like to fight hard to win.”
Which will come in handy. As chairman of the 3,600-strong Criminal Bar Association (CBA) he is organising roadshows on the latest proposals on criminal legal aid.
function slideshowPopUp This battle is far from won. Two sets of options are on the table: one from the Legal Services Commission (LSC) on high-cost trials and the other from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) on defence fees generally. Both mean big cuts. The MoJ paper proposes either a one-off cut of 18 per cent for all hearings or a smaller 13.5 per cent decrease over three years — but with strings attached. The LSC paper outlines three options, including one already rejected by the commission and the MoJ as “impracticable and unworkable”, Mendelle says — namely extending graduated (fixed) fees from 40- to 60-day trials. The aim is to find up to 50 per cent savings.
“We know this is an option dreamt up on the hoof because it had never featured in any discussions or negotiations we had had with the LSC and MoJ in the previous 18 months. Once again we’d negotiated with the Government in good faith and, once again, the Government has repaid us by not so much moving the goal posts as knocking them down and repainting the pitch into the bargain.”
Barristers have put forward an alternative scheme that pays a fair fee, controls costs and cuts red tape: the present management of legal aid by the LSC has been criticised by the National Audit Office as wasteful and expensive. Money could also be saved jailing fewer petty offenders, he says.
“People are very, very, very angry. They feel they don’t have a free choice. They have an economic gun to their heads. But the price of accepting the apparently better offer is a bad scheme.” The CBA is taking counsel’s advice on prospects for judicial review.
Mendelle, a father of three, grandfather of two and ardent football supporter (Manchester United — “since 1957 when they were losing the Cup Final”) came late to the Bar. He went to Ilford County High School, Essex (his father was a plant manager in an asbestos factory), then to the City after “less than distinguished” A levels, doing capital equipment finance. But the work bored him and brushes with lawyers, including winning a small claims case, persuaded him that he could do the job himself. He read for a law degree part-time while working, then gave up work to sit Bar finals.
Pupillage was with top sets, with pupil-masters Stanley Burnton, Alistair Macduff and Alan Moses (now all judges). His tenancy was in a “young and hungry” defence set and so began a mixed civil and criminal practice that is now all crime. At 63, joint head of 25 Bedford Row chambers and at the top of his game, what does he think of the justice system?
The recent Edlington boys case, he says, is “thankfully rare”, but such cases pose particular difficulties. Mendelle is wary of commenting on the basis of media reports but says that while many argue that the boys are too young to be tried or sentenced in an adult Crown Court, “this is the system we have at the moment and the court has to pass sentences that fit the crimes committed by these children. It is an exceptionally difficult balance to strike.”
He is concerned, as a passionate supporter of the jury system, that the jury-less trial may be the thin end of the wedge; and about victims of crime being misled by politicians as to how much of a role they really have in the criminal justice system. That exists, he says, to “do justice between the parties; it is not a private dispute in which victims sometimes think the prosecutor is acting for them”. And on sentencing, judges should be trusted to get it right and not fettered with ever more statutory guidelines. “Ministers can’t micro-manage every case. That produces injustice.”
Meanwhile, it is back to fighting the case for the Criminal Bar. “We are pragmatic and accept the need for cuts. But that does not have to mean these savage and unprincipled cuts to fees that have already seen their value eroded by a decade of inflation.”