Speeding up justice
Why the DPP wants to make a difference
“I know many lawyers will disagree with what I’m about to say,” Stephen Parkinson told the Commons justice committee yesterday. But that wouldn’t stop him saying it.
“I think the job I do is the most impactful, consequential and worthwhile job any lawyer I can do,” the director of public prosecutions remarked.
Was it really true that he had wanted the job since he was 25, asked an incredulous Andy Slaughter, the committee chair. It was indeed.
Parkinson admitted that he abandoned his ambition in his mid-40s after applying unsuccessfully for appointment as director of the Serious Fraud Office. He then left the public service and spent 20 years as a criminal defence lawyer at Kingsley Napley, applying for his current job only after he had retired. He was delighted to get it.
Parkinson’s highest priority as director was to reduce delays in cases coming to court. With trials now being listed for 2027, some defendants were certainly taking advantage of the wait — in the hope, he thought, that complainants or witnesses would simply withdraw. On the other hand, said Parkinson, there was a human cost to defendants having a case hanging over them for such a long time, whether they were guilty or not.
How, then, could we reduce the backlog?
One way would be to “squeeze out the guilty pleas” — to encourage defendants who intended to plead guilty to do so at the earliest opportunity. That could save, on average, four court appearances for each defendant.
And how might that be achieved? Parkinson offered two suggestions that he thought could be “transformative”.
It was not widely known that the attorney general’s guidelines for serious and complex fraud cases allowed prosecutors to approach defence lawyers ahead of a hearing and agree where a case sat within the sentencing guidelines. If defendants had a better idea of the sentence they would receive, they might plead guilty earlier and take advantage of the discounts on offer.
The second factor he mentioned was that defence lawyers received substantially higher fees if a defendant pleaded guilty at a later stage in the proceedings. The case was then classified as a “cracked trial” and, for barristers, the fee might be nearly double what they would be paid if the defendant had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity.
“We’re not incentivising the defence to give early attention to papers, he said. Something needed to be done.
Parkinson answered MPs’ questions for two-and-a-half hours. Sessions used to be shorter before the election but the new Labour-led committee seems rather better attended than it was under the Conservatives. You can watch the entire session on the Commons website.
There will be more suggestions for reducing court delays in my next podcast.
The starting and finishing premise for so many of these failings around for “answers” seems too often to be to impute bad faith or a lack of public spiritedness to the criminal defence sector. My beleaguered former colleagues can do no more and no better than to lurch from one crisis after another, operating on paper thin profit margins. And yet it is the defence to get all or most of the flak. I KNOW: I did THE job for forty seven years, front of house in Magistrates’ and Crown Courts, back of house with police station advice followed by a day’s advocacy on precious little sleep AND helping to run an office. Also I with a Committee as its Chair delved into all this and faced down similar underinformed or “own agenda” based attacks. Legal aid fee structures are the mishmash one has to expect from fighting rearguard actions against governments of all hues just to keep our waterlogged ships afloat. Without adequate -or ANY- disclosure how can defence practitioners tell it how it is to their clients? A way of streamlining disposals in heavy cases? Change the prison rules so that privileges for prisoners remain post conviction after pleas of “guilty” and before sentence. When in prison the merest crumbs of remand status privileges count for so much. Let us abandon the assumption that you have constantly to penalise rather than reward or deliver basic comforts which ought in any civilised country to be a given.
Thank you for an extremely interesting article. Could having a PM who used to head up the CPS himself is resulting in MPs giving a higher priority to such matters?