"Why would I support legal aid? I'm never going to need it."

[major_clanger]

Apparently this is a common response to concerns about the Ministry of Justice's cuts to legal aid. At the One Bar, One Voice event yesterday one of the speakers gave a good example of its importance to people who think they're never likely to get into trouble.

Mrs X was a middle-class woman who had never been in trouble with the police before. She worked with voluntary groups and had family in the USA whom she periodically visited.

One day, picking up her children from school, she got involved in an argument with another parent. The police were called, and the other woman accused Mrs X of assaulting her. Mrs X denied this, but the police suggested that rather than get bogged down in defending a charge she simply accept a caution.

Fortunately, Mrs X insisted on speaking to a lawyer before agreeing to this. The lawyer spoke to her and looked at the evidence, and informed Mrs X that there was no evidence even to charge her. He also pointed out that had Mrs X accepted the caution, it would have affected her criminal record check status, so causing problems with her voluntary work, and would have made it difficult to get a visa waiver to visit her family in the USA. As it was, the lawyer was able to get the police to drop the matter.

Any of us could find ourselves in legal trouble. If you're not worried about legal aid cuts because you think only bad people need it, think again.

Comments

[watervole]

Ouch. The police really really should have mentioned it would affect her DAB record.

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

Assuming you can never get in trouble is either ludicrous self-deception, or a strong confidence that you're of a class that the police will treat as being axiomatically in the right. Which is stupid, there's always someone more important, and the police usually do the job honestly.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Of course members of the Cabinet wouldn't ever be hassled by or conspired against by the police. That would never happen.

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

Of course not, and neither would the police ignore law-breaking by an influential media organisation, or come up with stretched interpretations of the law to defend it.

[matrixmann]

Speeches like this only come from people who can be sure they can afford it.
But anyway, they're going to cut off what they want to cut off. If they say "we have no money for that", then they have no money for that.

It doesn't matter what it is.
If they consider having money for something unnecessary, then they get even the unnecessary.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I, too, thought you were leading up to a story where someone turned out to need legal aid money, but it ended up being a story where someone needed legal advice. I can't imagine Rupert Murdoch or, to take the example above, a cabinet minister, claiming they'll never need legal advice.

There are people who say they're never going to need the money, and often they're even right, but they're still morally wrong about that meaning that scrapping legal aid assistance funds is okay.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Well, legal aid doesn't work by HMG writing you a cheque. Rather, a lawyer is authorised to work for you on the basis of being paid later by the Legal Aid Agency.

What happened here is that Mrs X had the free services of a lawyer who was available to advise her because of the availability of criminal legal aid. As it is cut back, we are seeing more and more cases of small local law firms not doing such work, because it is uneconomical for them.

Yes, Mrs X was always in the position of being able to phone up a lawyer and promise to pay for advice. But would she have done that? Or, with an apparently reasonable proposal from the police, would she have accepted the caution instead?

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

Typical lazy policing. DOn't bother to actually investigte. Just see if someone will "confess" i.e. accept a caution.
Is it just me or does the fact that we use the term "caution" in respect to two completely different police interactions with the public ("Miranda" rightsas they're called in the US and a sumary conviction by a police office) part of the problem here. Being aware of the "summar conviction" variant I was confused and very worried when giving evidence to a police officer "under caution" a few years ago when he said he'd "have to caution me before I made a statement".

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

We're probably comfortably enough off never to be going to need legal aid, but your story reminds me how little people in my personal circumstances can ever trust our friends the plod! :o/

[teaparty.net (from livejournal.com)]

I also have a vague recollection that, unlike most convictions, cautions don't expire, making them additionally dangerous when it comes to any aspect of life when convictions/cautions must be declared. MC, might you care to comment?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

As ever, it's complicated, and there's a difference between a conviction or caution becoming spent for the purposes of having to declare it in general, and expiring for a check with the Disclosure and Barring Service. The rules recently changed to ensure that more old convictions and cautions were removed from DBS checks, although this really only applies to very minor offences:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/disclosure-and-barring-service-filtering

Cautions tend not to be given for serious offences, although I have seen cases where the police offer one when really a charge should have been proffered, e.g. for s.47 assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Such a caution may well affect the person it's given to for a long time.

Another issue is with youth cautions (which recently replaced warnings and reprimands for first offenders under 18). These can be given to a child aged 10-17, but if the offence was of a sexual nature can result in the child being designated a sex offender. The rules now provide that this must be explained to a child, and with an appropriate adult present if the child is under 16, because of cases with the old warnings/reprimands where a child accepted one for, e.g. groping a fellow pupil, and then discovered some years later that he was now classed as a sex offender.