Given that TV cameras aren’t allowed to film British criminal trials, Channel 4’s new documentary series Barristers: Fighting for Justice is a courtroom drama without the courtroom. As for the drama bit, the programme does its excitable and occasionally successful best – but isn’t always backed up by its own participants, who on the whole are a serious and disappointingly discreet bunch. All of them, you imagine, would have plenty of cracking tales to tell after a few drinks. As things stand, however, they stick firmly to no-shit-Sherlock generalisations. ‘What I do is present the defence case on behalf of my client,’ said one in Tuesday’s episode. ‘It’s very important that innocent people aren’t convicted,’ argued another.
Leading the way was Leon-Nathan Lynch, whose client here had been charged with carjacking a Mercedes at knifepoint, having got into the back seat when it stopped in traffic. The client’s own story, delivered in a voiceover, didn’t sound terribly promising to me. He was, he told us, brought up in a church family and had gone to private school. Unfortunately, he’d ‘ended up going the wrong way’ – more specifically by spending most of his life in prison after committing loads of crimes. But not, he insisted, in this case – because the carjacking had been carried out at the request of the owner, who wanted the insurance. ‘I’ve gone from doing someone a favour to being the bad guy,’ the client lamented.
Faced with this, Leon was surprisingly bullish about his chances of courtroom victory. His spirts rose further when he discovered that this particular model of Merc automatically locks when stationary – and even if it hadn’t, why wouldn’t his client have used the passenger or driver’s door like any normal carjacker?
And from there, we had to rely on the narrator reporting what was happening in court – which she did rather patchily.
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