Jay Blades - justice delayed is justice denied

Quartz

Quartz

Quartz

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BBC article here

www.bbc.co.uk

Repair Shop presenter Jay Blades pleads not guilty to rape

The TV presenter faces a trial at Shrewsbury Crown Court in September 2027
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk

This case will not be tried until 2027. That's a very long time. How is he supposed to earn a living in the interim? Would you employ someone with a pending rape case?

And what of his accuser? There too is an agonising wait
 
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Not quite the same, but know of a guy who'd been arrested in autumn 2021, and didn't even get charged until spring 2025! They'd even seized his phone, computers, kids' console etc, for that whole time.

Doesn't really seem fair, nor particularly good for the safety of society, for these things to take so long.
 
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Unfortunately, especially for the victims that seems to be quite quick, IIRC the backlog for such cases in some areas is around 4-5 years.

15 years of cutting back on the courts, science services, and especially the barristers pay has led to a situation where we don't have anything like the capacity to deal with complex, longer cases in a reasonable time frame.
IIRC most barristers cannot actually pay for their staff/ongoing running costs with what the government pays after the cuts, wo a lot of them are relying on the firms they work with to basically subsidise them which means there are far fewer barristers than we actually need because they're either giving it up, or not bothering to qualify for it in the first place as it's not something they can sustain.

From memory this is something that has been getting worse year on year for about 7 years.
 
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State of the justice system is a scandal really.
"It's not a proper justice system where people are having to wait that length of time for their trial," the judge added.
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Putting it gently really. Process must be torture for both the alleged victim and the accused. Imagine it's like having the sword of Damocles hanging over you the whole time, for both the victim waiting to find out of they'll see justice (in their eyes) and the accused waiting to be proved guilty or found innocent.

Just like the Post Office taking decades to own up to the Horizon scandal and delaying proper compensation is a scandal, so are the thousands of delayed criminal trials keeping people in limbo.

Not sure I'm a fan of everything the Secret Barrister says / does, but these delays and some of the causes are things that he's been talking about for years.
 
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The Barristers would rather spend their time milking the state for all it's worth with endless public inquiries and challenges to major iinfrastructure projects. It's what pays for the pro bono work of stopping rapists being deported and buying a new Sunseeker.
 
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Wow and I thought spending the last decade and half cutting the justice system back to the bone would result in a super efficient and effective court service.

Well. Poisoned.
 
PlacidCasual said:
The Barristers would rather spend their time milking the state for all it's worth with endless public inquiries and challenges to major iinfrastructure projects. It's what pays for the pro bono work of stopping rapists being deported and buying a new Sunseeker.
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Your regular barrister dealing with criminal cases is beung significantly underpaid especially when you work out their effective hourly rates as they are mostly self employed and the high levels of knowledge/ skill they are expected to have.

If you speak to barristers you'll find almost unanimous agreement that none of them get into criminal practice because they're motivated to do so by the promise of lots of money.

Other areas of practice like commercial law are far more lucrative.

A barrister practising criminal law isn't going to be taking cases to court opposing the goverment over infrastructure as well.

Its important to recognise that 'Barrister' is an umbrella term for people who (often exclusively) deal with very different parts of the law.
 
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PlacidCasual said:
The Barristers would rather spend their time milking the state for all it's worth with endless public inquiries and challenges to major iinfrastructure projects. It's what pays for the pro bono work of stopping rapists being deported and buying a new Sunseeker.
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What a load of balls.

The justice system has been gutted. They can’t do anything without money and people and the Tory government denied them both over the 14 years they were in power.
 
PlacidCasual said:
Are you Kier Starmer, I claim my £5.

In the words of another wag the process might be right but the answer is wrong.
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Your classic Ferrari is broken, you take it to Bob who repairs mopeds.

That's the sort of thing you are sayung happens with barristers.
Even criminal law is a very wide subject and has specialists, let alone immigration, or human right, and the you've got commercial law which is the one with the money as the clients aren't reliant on government set pay levels that are r a joke compared to the costs of providing the service.

Seriously please actually look at the basic information on what a barrister is, how they get paid and the costs they have. Most criminal law barristers paid for by legal aid make a loss on those cases, or at best a fraction of what the could get for privately funded cases. It's caused a massive backlog as they can't survive on what the government pays for criminal cases, so you have them either trying to do a few criminal cases at government rate whilst working privately, working for a firm that subsidies them, or them not touching the cases.
 
Werewolf said:
Most criminal law barristers paid for by legal aid make a loss on those cases, or at best a fraction of what the could get for privately funded cases. It's caused a massive backlog as they can't survive on what the government pays for criminal cases, so you have them either trying to do a few criminal cases at government rate whilst working privately, working for a firm that subsidies them, or them not touching the cases.
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Indeed. Legal aid has been gutted to the point that only the well off can afford legal representation. That’s the real two tier justice system at work in this country.
 
It's unforgivable bad. One of the most terrible legacies of fourteen years of Tory-led rule. It's a pity it doesn't get more attention as something that urgently needs fixing.
 
Quartz said:
So, how is he supposed to earn a living?
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That's a question a lot of people have been asking as the delays got longer over the last 14 years and everyone from judges to defence lawyers to politicians who had a clue condemned the cuts.

IIRC the barristers actually went on strike about the last proposed cuts/rates they were meant to get paid, whilst the CPS has been dropping an increasing number of cases because they don't have the manpower to deal with the prosecutions, whilst an increasing number of the ones that did go ahead ended up with costly delays because the government couldn't provide barristers with the information in a timely manner before the court date, or because when it got to court the infrastructure needed wasn't working because of delays in repairs due to budget cuts.
 
Quartz said:
I had hoped to keep politics out of it, but Starmer has been in power for a year; what has he done to rectify the situation?
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As with a lot of things, all we need is a magic money tree.

In absence of that, a decision is made to **** off a group of people by taxing them more or cancelling tax money being given/spent on them and using it for the other thing that is demanding money but louder.
 
The real kicker is that there is plenty of money available, it's just that the cretins in power like to syphon it off to friends and families, waste it on useless projects or hand it over to foreign countries rather than use it to actually benefit this country.
 
Quartz said:
I had hoped to keep politics out of it, but Starmer has been in power for a year; what has he done to rectify the situation?
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Lets put it this way, it takes years to train up lawyers, and then barristers take even longer and you need to have pay deals that actually cover their costs and encourage them to both take it up and stick with it.

Then you've got the problem of the number of court rooms, the judges, the support staff.

It's going to take years and god only knows how many billions to fix, as it's everything from magistrates up that we need more of, and a large number of the magistrates courts were not only closed, but sold off so they aren't even there to reopen it's going to require building new places (you can't just take an office and turn it into a magistrates).
Basically it'll take the better part of a decade of investment to make a real dent in it because everything involved in the system is messed up due to the cuts.
 
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Quartz said:
So, how is he supposed to earn a living?
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The same way as anyone else with a pending trial. He applies to 1000 places in the hope that he finds someone who will employ him under those circumstances.

Or is it supposed to be different for him because he’s famous?
 
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