Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of law for my own safety’s sake!

October 24, 2025 – Robert Bolt

How do you defend people when you know they are guilty? The dinner party question. It never goes away, unlike dinner parties. The questioners always use ‘know’ rather than ‘think’. You never get asked how you prosecute people if you think they might be innocent. One or two of them (and their cars) have even had the odd brush with the law. I bet they never asked their own lawyer the DPQ.

Over the years I have developed stock answers to things that people persistently raise. Waiting staff in restaurants who ask ‘have you any allergies?’ always get the answer ‘we’ll soon find out’ and, although I feel like a stand-up comedian chancing his luck, it always gets a laugh. I stumbled across the answer to the DPQ when being asked it by an obnoxious person sitting next to me at some dinner. The allergy question often comes out with the same rush that adverts trying to sell you detergents end on – ‘always keep away from children’ – or the world land-speed record for speaking on Classic FM when an advertiser trying to flog you some financial service in a mellifluously paced voice suddenly shoots out ‘terms and conditions apply’ at the very end.

The DPQ is quite different from this. The woman in question was utterly typical of the genre. She moved slightly closer and looked at me in a strange way. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ she said. ‘No,’ I replied, although actually I both knew what was coming and did object. ‘How can you defend someone when you know they are guilty?’ She spoke in a strangely strangulated way. I had learned from bitter experience that my answer did not matter, whether it was better nine guilty men go free than one innocent person be wrongly convicted or that my belief was irrelevant, or that I was there to ensure the defendant had a fair trial etc. No, only the question matters and the look of moral superiority that I was being given. It was then that the only answer that would take out that look, and indeed any further conversation, occurred to me. ‘It excites me,’ I said.

It is said that Margaret Thatcher once made a comment along the lines of why should a burglar caught red-handed in a victim’s home with the silverware stuffed in his capacious pockets be entitled to a Rolls-Royce legal defence team at public expense. Even the most penally minded person would he hard put to call present legal aid a Rolls-Royce. It is more like an old Lada on its last legs.

Paddy Corkhill, as he so often does, put his finger on it more precisely. We had taken out two of our pupils for a drink after a rather difficult training exercise in sentencing chaired by Hetty Briar-Pitt, involving mutilation of a horse. Both pupils are very able and I thought that Kate, who had been assigned to defend the offender, genuinely said everything that could possibly be said on his behalf. Hetty’s problem was that she thought Kate had said rather too much and that, in fact, there wasn’t any mitigation at all except his plea of guilty. It reminded me of a time many years ago when we went to see Equus and she started shouting out from the stalls. As we all minus Hetty unwound across the road, Omar, the pupil who had been given the Prosecution brief, asked us how the system had changed from our early days.

Paddy said, before drawing breath, ‘This nonsense they say now about a criminal trial not being a game.’ ‘It isn’t a game, is it?’ said Kate. ‘It is and it isn’t,’ said Paddy. ‘What they mean by it is no technical objections and if you fail to give evidence they’ll hold it against you.’ ‘Isn’t it important just to get to the truth?’ asked Omar. ‘Listen!’ said Paddy, ‘the Prosecution has many advantages in a trial and the Defence gets some concessions as a crude balance of fairness, or at least that’s how it was. You can call it a game if you want, but if so, it’s just playing the few cards you are, or were, reluctantly given by the state which, after all, is supposed to be proving beyond reasonable doubt a person’s guilt.’

Omar and Kate suddenly and dramatically shot under the table. Paddy had clearly not lost his powers of oratory. Then I saw what they must have seen; Hetty in the street passing by our café’s large window.