The background- legal aid has been guaranteed for serious cases with the State paying for a criminal defence if the person has inadequate finance. Following the recession the government cut the supply of money for such payments and put a ceiling on money paid to the attorneys involved in the defence. The attorneys believe that this does not cover their costs and are not coming forward for criminal legal aid work. The government were warned that as Judges have a responsibility to ensure trials are fair, they would start throwing out cases where defendants were not adequately represented.
Today it happened. The Attorney involved, embarrassingly, is the brother of the Prime Minister.
I believe that in the US the courts have powers to force attorneys as officers of the court to conduct a defence for basic payment as a public defender.
It is separation of powers because the courts are using judicial decisions to make a political statement. And the Executive is imposing rules on the administration of justice.
They most certainly do not. They have the power to require that the state hire a private attorney be hired to represent a defendant if the public defender’s office is unable to (because it already has too many cases or a conflict of interest), but no attorney can be forced to take a case under any circumstances unless he is a state employee.
TV programs and novels are pretty bad sources of legal information. Even John Grisham’s novels (he was a criminal defense attorney before taking up writing, IIRC) play way fast and loose with the rules of criminal procedure (because they don’t leave much room for the courtroom “gotcha” that makes the story interesting.)
If you want to see a movie that portrays US courtrooms accurately try A Few Good Men. The political stuff is way overblown but the procedures are pretty much true to life (and military courtrooms don’t function much differently where it matters.)
I guess I don’t see the problem. If Britain has decided it’s not willing to pay for a proper criminal justice system then at some point the only appropriate response is to throw cases out.
It’s similar to the situation in California, where California was unwilling (actually unable as the State was near bankruptcy) to properly fund a corrections system so there was extreme prison overcrowding. A judge ruled a large portion of those prisoners had to be released by a certain date to reduce the prison population to safe capacity (or I guess the Governor could have tried to increase capacity in some way.)
I don’t see it as a political statement at all – it’s a statement in furtherance of the court’s interest in justice. A political statement would be something like throwing out a case because of the party affiliation of the Government.
Hate to tell you this, but the other parts of government is always imposing rules on the administration of justice. Funding, rules of evidence, and oh yeah - the laws themselves are all examples of “imposing rules on the administration of justice.”
I think the issue here is that there can be differing views on what constitutes “a proper criminal justice system”. Britain apparently spends more per capita on criminal defence for the indigent than any of the G-8 states. I happen to think the US public defender system is woefully underfunded (and I am hardly alone), but that doesn’t mean the UK’s isn’t too expensive.
Well, the question is, under what legal authority are they dismissing these cases? In the US, if the executive takes the position that it wants to prosecute cases against indigent defendants, and the legislature takes the position that it doesn’t want to fund the defense in those cases, a court will throw it out because the Sixth Amendment overrides both. What is the authority that compels a British judge to find that the defense of these indigent cases is inadequate? Or in other words, inadequate according to what?
I am fairly certain English law also recognizes a common-law right to counsel for the indigent.
In this case, the defense was “inadequate” because it didn’t exist; no barrister was willing to accept the fee offered by legal aid to defend the case. You can read the judgment here.
There’s another case on the verge of collapse due to the same legislation that’s caused the problem in the OP.
This time it’s due to the reduction in fees payable to expert witnesses. Who would have thought that making someone with no legal background whatsoever Lord Chancellor and SoS for Justice would lead to poorly thought out legislation?
The overall duty of the courts to provide a fair trial. If counsel is necessary to provide a fair trial in a complex case (as this one is - allegation of a fraudulent land scheme of some sort), and the accused can’t pay for counsel, then the Crown has to provide a way for the accused to have counsel. If the Crown doesn’t do that, the courts have a duty to stay the charges - not because they are stepping into a policy dispute with the government, but because as a court, their ultimate duty is to provide a fair trial to the accused.
As Really Not All that Bright mentions, the right is protected by both the Convention, which Britain has incorporated into its domestic law, and also from the common law right of the accused to a fair trial, assisted by counsel. At common law, the court has an inherent authority to insure its process is not abused; if the Crown tries to insist on a trial without counsel, when counsel is necessary for a fair trial, that can amount to an abuse of the court’s process, warranting a stay of proceedings.
Even John Grisham’s novels (he was a criminal defense attorney before taking up writing, IIRC) play way fast and loose with the rules of criminal procedure (because they don’t leave much room for the courtroom “gotcha” that makes the story interesting.)