Criminal Defence

Lady Justice is often depicted wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents impartiality – the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power or other status. However, austerity politics is playing on class divisions in the UK to test this ideal to its destruction. It can only be hoped that the election in June will prove to have been the beginning of the end of austerity in the UK.

Legal commentators have rightly hailed the announcement of a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) between the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and...

The new sentencing guideline for young people published recently and due to come into effect on 1 June, introduces a...

The Age of Unreason is upon us. Brexit and the popularity of Trump and May are simply symptoms of a...

Criminal defence practitioners this week will have approached the publishing of the new definitive guideline on reduction in sentence for a guilty plea, which becomes effective in June, with some trepidation. The proposed guidelines released last year for consultation seemed to demonstrate a worryingly prescriptive approach and suggested a significant limiting of reductions in sentence for pleas proffered after the first hearing.