Alice Miles
Judgment day for the streetwise kids
What did a group of teenagers from the tough streets of Bermondsey get when they went to the Old Bailey? No, not five to ten years, but an eye-opening day’s education
It is three and a half miles but a world away from Southwark’s newest school to the Old Bailey. The City of London Academy, a vast steel and glass structure just three years old, gleams amid the industrial estates and iron-gated front doors of this dirty corner of South London. Smartly atop it, slightly incongruously, sits the logo of the Corporation of London.
Sweep down the Old Kent Road through the council estates of Bermondsey, and the late-night off-licences and takeaways quickly give way to yuppy warehouse conversions, boutique shops and shiny developments along the river. Across the Thames is the corporation’s heartland, the City, where bankers in tailored suits drink £3 lattes in Italian delicatessens (at least, they did until last month). In their midst, the Old Bailey squats, heavy stone and marble, getting on for three and a half centuries of history behind it. A golden Lady Justice balances on high. “Defend the Children of the Poor & Punish the Wrongdoer,” admonishes the inscription over the main entrance.
Inside, in a wood-panelled room hung with cartoons of judges and carpeted in striking blue, six teenagers from the academy are questioning the most senior criminal judge in the country, fresh out of presiding over a murder trial.
“When you sat up there, what was you writing down?”
“Do you ever have jurors nodding off?”
“How do you become a judge?”
“Have you ever thought, ‘I regret doing this’?”
“Have you ever in retrospect thought that you issued the wrong sentence?”
“Why do you wear them robes and the wig?”
Last weekend the 28th death of a teenager through stabbing in London this year took place, just days after Boris Johnson launched a plan to tackle the causes of teenage violence, focusing on education, sport and first-time offenders. We tried another approach: to take six teenagers, selected by their school, around the famous courts and introduce them to the other end of street crime. The City of London, which sponsors the Academy and runs the Old Bailey, hosted the visit, and invited The Times along to watch.
Judge Peter Beaumont, QC, Recorder of London, the most senior judge at the Central Criminal Court (to give the Old Bailey its correct title), answered the barrage of questions adroitly.
“The judge has very little other than his own personality to keep control,” he explained. “We are dealing with people who are under stress, who are often reliving moments which matter a lot to them, there are all the emotions on either side…and if by dressing up in formal clothes and the formality of language that’s used in court we can stop people calling each other names and refusing to answer questions, then the formality helps.” And the wig? “It makes the judge as a figure anonymous.”
What about all that telephone evidence? “People who commit crime, it seems to me, spend an awful lot of time afterwards talking about it on the phone.” He was patient and comfortable with them, as perhaps befits a man with 19 years’ experience of explaining legal terminology to bemused jurors.
“When you first step into court as a judge is a really worrying moment, which you remember till the day you die,” he told the students.
It turned out that I needn’t have worried about the communication gap between the most senior criminal judge in England, a man who spends his life sentencing violent criminals, and a group of students who admitted that their contemporaries generally do not like “the law” because to them it means interrogation by the police.
“He’s just a nice, normal, down-to-earth person!” said Lanyor, a fierce and elegant 16-year-old, of the judge. To my surprise, the students all agreed that the costumery was a good thing.
“Things change but if you have some kind of structure it won’t fall apart,” Lanyor commented thoughtfully.
“If the costume was to change it would lose some of its mystique,” said Jack, who edits the school newspaper.
Their headteacher, Martyn Coles, who had chosen which students to bring, said that he was “terribly proud” of them and the questions that they asked. “Young people don’t know enough about this process. They know about what’s happening in South London, but the consequences, they don’t know about.”
Lanyor, who plans to be a lawyer one day, knows too much about what’s happening in South London. She knew two of the boys stabbed to death on the streets this year: 15-year-old Lyle Tulloch, killed in Southwark, and 16-year-old Shaki Townsend, killed in Thornton Heath.
In Court Six we watched part of a murder trial in similar circumstances: a gang, a silly row, a chase, a knife, somebody stabbed; another pointless death. There was the usual confusion in the evidence. The 18-year-old defendant sat silent and nervous as his barrister cross-examined one of the witnesses.
I say “cross-examined”: slowly, gently, reeled him in, would be more accurate. The barrister was trying to suggest that the dead boy Naz, a friend of the witness, fell on the defendant’s knife; the defendant had not intended to stab him. Relatives of the defendant and the dead man sweated in the public gallery; the teenagers from the academy watched silently behind them.
The witness was hostile, the barrister dangerously polite: a surly black kid, a highly educated white man.
Lawyer: You saw him drop on to the defendant?
Witness: Towards him.
Lawyer: In your police interview, you said, ‘I saw Naz fall down like in front, then like Naz kind of fell like down . . . Naz kind of dropped on to him’.
Witness: Yeah.
Judge Beaumont policed the balance, making sure the witness had the correct statements to assist him, explaining to the jury the (in)significance of someone giving evidence by video. Presumably in 19 years on the bench he has heard it all before.
“Scary,” said Helen as we trooped out. “Very scary.”
“I wasn’t scared,” Lanyor asserted.
“Who was the boy sitting at the back?” asked one of the students of the defendant (who has since been convicted); the witness had appeared to him to be the one on trial. Which, in a sense, he was.
I asked Lanyor whether she thought a visit to the Old Bailey might deter teenagers from getting involved in fights; show them the consequences of picking up a knife, or joining in a fight. She wasn’t convinced. “I know lots of people who have been in prison,” she said. “They are thinking, ‘It’s the end of the road for me’, some of them are thinking, ‘My friends are in Feltham, I can go there and be happy there’. You can’t change their minds.”
Then she got thinking.
“When I was looking at the defendant he was there twitching, biting his knuckles, his family were biting their knuckles, I was like, wow, this is intense. When you see that and see their emotions on their face . . . I would say, ‘Do you know what? The family was there, they might as well have been on trial as well. To know that your flesh and blood – to the mum, her baby – is in a cell, four walls, not going to see daylight again – if you really care about your mum, or your family, you should at least think twice’. That’s what I would tell them.”
Charles Henty would have been proud to hear it. A graduate of Eton, Sandhurst and the Guards, he is a man with three equally baffling titles – the Secondary of London, Under Sheriff and High Bailiff of Southwark – and he runs the Old Bailey with the military precision that you would expect. “The purpose of being here,” he told the teenagers sternly on arrival, “is to educate you as to the consequences of your actions.” If the pupils, all bright A-level students, were slightly bemused, they were too polite to show it.
And first we had to tear them away from the toilets, where they were stuck, awestruck at the marble and the space: “It’s so nice!” One looked quizzically at the fine tap: “How does it work?”
Henty gave us the tour of a lifetime, from the heights to the depths of the Old Bailey, out on the rooftop beneath the scales of Lady Justice and down to the airless prisoners’ cells, smelling of old takeaways: “Do not press any buttons and do not close the doors. I cannot open them,” Henty cautioned, adding for good measure a tale of a category A prisoner who bit into and ate his own arm in one of the cells, “just to prove he was tough”.
We read down the list of defendants due in the next day and from where: Belmarsh, Feltham, Holloway, the litany of social failure. We were shown along a re-creation of Dead Man’s Walk, the series of thinner and thinner arches through which condemned men, women and children would traipse to the gallows – with a horribly claustrophobic feeling of finality about it. Or, as Lanyor put it as she charged down: “It’s fun!”
Henty told them about Nicholas White, hanged aged 9 for the theft of a prisoner’s bed linen. The students fell silent: “Aged 9? He was hanged?” He told them about the medium so spooked when she entered the dead man’s cell, in which the condemned spent their last hours, that she left without speaking.
And in Court One, dark and forbidding, where some of the country’s most famous murderers have been tried – Dr Crippen, John Christie, Ian Huntley – he told them that each case costs on average £80 to £100 a minute to try. “A minute? Oh! Why is that?” exclaimed Lanyor. When she is a lawyer, she will find out.
“Who actually tidies up?” Jack wanted to know now, gazing at the mess of court papers and files abandoned for the evening in mid-trial. And can anyone be a juror – “even a celebrity?”
By the end of the day, Aldaine, a psychology student, had decided that he wanted to work for the witness service, to help people through the court process. Lanyor was more convinced than ever that she would be a lawyer (snap her up, someone). Jack appeared most impressed (a) at the electric-blue carpets – “jazzy, innit?” and (b) at discovering that “there’s real people working here, they have families and things like that”. By now he had struck up an unlikely friendship with Henty, who had changed into ceremonial kit and was sporting a bib with a striking resemblance to a large doily.
Jack was particularly struck that Henty had recently worked from 5am one day until 2am the next without a break. “It seems like it’s not a chore,” he remarked. “Like the people in the witness service, people love their jobs. They really want to help people.”
“Stay on the right side of the law,” Henty admonished them. “You are bright young things – do make sure you use that constructively.”
And then he and Jack went to pore over Henty’s electric-blue motorbike, deep in discussion about his children and his living arrangements at the Old Bailey during the week. “Where do you sleep?” I heard Jack ask.
I was wrong. It isn’t so far from Southwark to the Old Bailey after all.
theoldbailey 
Leave a comment