Joanna Hardy-Susskind is a criminal defence barrister. It’s her job to represent people, guilty or innocent, who have been charged with offences ranging from the minor to the horrific. When those on the outside world find out what she does, they often have the same question: “Why do you do it, in those dusty court rooms, in front of those imposing judges, wearing a silly fancy-dress costume, with everyone shouting at each other in Latin?”
You Do Not Have to Say Anything is her answer. It’s a close-up examination of one of the most fundamental but misunderstood pillars of any society, a branch of the state that most people rarely encounter. Across ten short episodes, we are led through every stage of the criminal justice process: from the back of the police car and the interrogation room, behind the scenes as solicitors and barristers hash out their plans, and into the (often crumbling) court itself.
Hardy-Susskind makes an engaging presenter (it’s not that different a job to advocating in court, when you think about it), and is forthcoming about her less glamorous experiences – going back to bed fully dressed at 6am on a Saturday to wait for a call summoning her to court, for example, or leaving her £800 wig in the back of a taxi. But the real magic of this series are the people she interviews “beneath the wigs, under the uniforms and in the dock”. Most moving of all is one of her former clients, who recounts his panic at being shaken from his sleep and arrested the night before his university interview, and then how it felt to be standing in a courtroom years later as the jury delivered their “not guilty” verdict.
This series does not lionise the criminal justice system – the opposite, if anything, as Hardy-Susskind delves into how and why things go wrong. But by centring the people involved the programme does demystify it, countering the misleading narratives pushed by police TV shows and legal dramas. In the end, this is a system “with real humour, heart and humanity – and less Latin than you might think”.
You Do Not Have to Say Anything
BBC Radio 4
[See also: The woman who made the rape kit]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out