Gutter journalism. #FakeLaw by The Sun and The Mail.

A truly vile exploitation of a grieving widow to make dishonest and intellectually void attacks on legal aid and the rule of law.

Here’s why it’s nonsense:

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1. To start, these men did not “get £500,000 of taxpayers’ cash in legal aid”. £465,000 - not £500k - was the overall sum paid to their lawyers. This is like saying someone who receives a NHS heart transplant is “gets” the cost of the operation in “cash”. It’s nonsense.

2. Readers are invited to conclude that £465,000 is too much to spend on this case. The journalist has not bothered to tell you any of the context that you would need to even *begin* to assess whether that cost is too high, too low, or about right. Such as...

3. How much of that figure includes VAT, which goes to the Treasury? How many lawyers & support staff worked on the case? What work was involved? How many hours, days, months went into this extremely serious case where the defendants were looking at a potential life sentence?

4. £465k sounds like a lot out of context. But the figures are gross, not net. Solicitors’ firms have staff to pay, business costs, rent, insurance, tax etc. Likewise barristers. When all that is broken down, what is the actual *profit* for these professionals?

5. What is the hourly rate? How does that compare to the hourly rate of other professionals? What does this journalist suggest *should* be paid to the most highly experienced professionals in their fields dealing with the most serious criminal cases?

6. Because this is is what it boils down to: if you are going to run a “news” story decrying the cost of legal aid, you should be able to give full context to show why it’s too much, and what sum would have been reasonable.

Of course, he doesn’t.

7. The real problem, the article invites us to conclude, is that these were bad people, and that is wrong for taxpayer money to be spent not merely on ensuring that bad people are fairly convicted, but - as happened here - on defending people who are *acquitted*.

8. It should go without saying, but for those at the back:

Anyone accused of a criminal offence has the right to a fair trial.

It’s not a fair trial if the prosecution has lawyers and the accused does not.

Legal aid rates are fixed by government well below market rates.

9. The reason you aren’t given the context for this headline sum is because that would ruin the story. It would be, when all is broken down, wholly unremarkable.

Instead, the reader is invited to resent the mere principle of an accused person having legal representation.

10. This attitude is ignorant, exploitative and dangerous. It is also prevalent. This thread is copied from responses to near-identical stories earlier this year. I make no apology for this - as long as they copy and paste trash #FakeLaw, I’ll copy and paste my rebuttals.

11. I don’t care if I am stuck on repeat. These #LegalAidLies have been allowed to flourish unchecked for years. Stories like these are like fake health cure articles - they cause irreparable damage not only to public understanding, but to people’s lives. They must be challenged.

12. But what makes this story even more outrageous, disgusting and immoral than usual is the cynical exploitation of a distraught young widow to push the Sun and the Mail’s anti-legal aid, anti-rule of law agenda.

Just look at the quotes manufactured from her anguish.

13. “The cost of injustice”

That “injustice” being a fair criminal trial conducted under the rule of law, in which the jury considered the evidence and delivered a verdict that Pc Harper’s grieving family disagreed with.

I have every sympathy. Truly. But that’s not “injustice”.

14. “It saddens me that so much public money has been spent - and continues to be spent - on defending the indefensible.”

Here’s why we defend the indefensible: because everybody - you, me, the people we fear and hate most - has the right to a defence if accused of a crime.

15. Everybody, even those deemed by the Mail or by victims to be “indefensible”, is entitled to be treated fairly by the justice system;
to a fair trial under the rule of law.

Not least because, as in this case, sometimes people are found not guilty of the “indefensible.”

16. That’s why legal aid matters. Of course the amount paid from the public purse has to be reasonable. The average take-home pay of a criminal barrister is £27k pa. A solicitor is less. The huge headline sums, without context, distort reality.

You are not being given the facts.

17. The lies you are told by The Sun and Mail about legal aid - what it’s for, what it costs, why we need it - are the reason governments have been able to remove legal aid from the most vulnerable in society without any political consequence.

Don’t let them lie to you. [ENDS]