Nothing But the Truth by The Secret Barrister

Author:The Secret Barrister [The Secret Barrister]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0745622143
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2022-03-23T17:00:00+00:00

Dillon (Part 1)

Dillon was born the sixth of seven children, and was the sixth of seven to be taken into care at birth. He was never told the identity of his father, whose surname he carried, and only knew his mum by her first name. A revolving door of state care, foster homes and temporary reunions with his mother and her latest violent, heroin-addicted boyfriend slowed to a halt in Dillon’s early teens, leaving him a permanent resident in local authority accommodation. Instability was also the hallmark of his schooling; his undiagnosed autism and ADHD manifested itself in behavioural problems, the easiest solution to which was to spring him out of mainstream education and into pupil referral units, from which he would truant with the older lads from the care home, who had older brothers with nice cars and all manner of intriguing things to smoke.

When Dillon, using the only language in which he had been taught fluency, lashed out with his fists against the chaotic disciplinary regime of his care home, he found himself the beneficiary of the local authority’s Prosecute First, Ask Questions Later childcare policy. Kick a door? Charged with criminal damage. Shove a member of staff? Charged with assault. Throw a chair? Add an affray. All unpleasant behaviour in need of correction, for sure, but the kind of acting out which, at certain types of private school or world-leading universities, might be quietly rectified by a hastily written cheque from the bank of Ma and Pa and a discreet course of therapy, rather than a criminal prosecution.

So it is that, by the time I meet Dillon at the age of seventeen, he has been before the Youth Court over a dozen times, with a list of convictions growing exponentially in length and seriousness. Today’s trial is an allegation of knifepoint robbery; that Dillon and a mate turned up unannounced on the nineteen-year-old complainant’s doorstep at 1 a.m., ragged him around and stole his phone. I didn’t know either of these men, the complainant has told the police. They just knocked on my door and I stepped outside to have a conversation with them about something . . . No, I can’t remember what, it was just general chit-chat, like one is wont to engage in when menacing hooded strangers arrive outside your house in the middle of the night. A curious allegation rendered slightly less curious by the subtext that in fact he knows Dillon and the other lad very well indeed, and this impromptu knock-on was enforcement of a cannabis debt.

The Youth Court is designed for defendants aged under eighteen. It carries less formality (defendants are referred to only by their first names), and there are restrictions on who can watch proceedings and what can be publicly reported. The principal aim of youth justice is rehabilitation – trying to prevent young people coming back into contact with the criminal justice system – in contrast to the adult system in which rehabilitation sits alongside punishment, deterrence, compensation and public protection as just one aim of criminal sentencing.

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