Exhibits A-D : four reasons why the legal aid reforms need to be stopped

The legal aid reforms will lead to innocent people being jailed. A barrister's wife explains why.

My blog, A Barrister’s Wife, started because I wanted to contribute to the Save UK Justice campaign against the changes to the criminal justice system outlined in the consultation paper Transforming Legal Aid: Delivering a more credible and efficient system. Some of the key changes are as follows:

Removal of the defendant’s right to choose a lawyer
Legal aid lawyers to be paid the same whether a defendant pleads guilty or goes to trial
Reduction of the income threshold at which defendants will be eligible for legal aid
Reduction of the number of legal aid providers from 1600 to 400
Competitive tendering for legal aid contracts

As things stand, these changes will be brought in under secondary legislation, without any debate in parliament. One of Save UK Justice’s aims is to get over 100 000 signatures on the Save UK Justice e-petition, so that these proposals might be debated in parliament.

When the campaign first started a few weeks ago I noticed that most of the conversation about the proposals was between lawyers. There was very little interest or input from non-legal people or the mainstream media. There seemed to be two reasons for this:

the public were unaware of the proposals and didn’t understand what they would mean in practice and in any case
the public wouldn’t care, because the only people perceived to be affected were lawyers and criminals

As the wife of a criminal barrister I have more insight into the workings of the justice system than most non-legal people. I decided to write a blog to try and debunk the myths that are ingrained in the public perception and to explain why these proposals should be of interest to everyone.

Initial posts covered the myth of the fat cat lawyer and the myth of the scumbag criminals. I then began looking in more detail at four of my husband’s cases. This “exhibits series” provides real life examples of how normal, law abiding, people can end up on the wrong side of the law. Each post concludes by explaining why the story matters and how each defendant might have fared under the MOJ’s proposals.