You don’t often see grown men cry, unless you count Paul Gascoigne (pictured). And you especially don’t see lawyers crying, especially not in public, and especially not in the courtroom. But that, it turns out, is just in the UK, where we are too reserved and repressed to really let our feelings show.

In bella Italia, things are a little different, as was seen last week. Luciano Ghirga, defence attorney in the Amanda Knox murder trial, apparently burst into tears when delivering his summing-up speech in a Perugia courtroom last week. Tears leaked out as he begged the jury in vain to ‘give Amanda her life back’ by acquitting her.

Such a show of passion might be unheard of in British courts, but perhaps it would not be out of place in the US, where stranger things have happened, and on a fairly regular basis.

Obiter is reminded of defence attorney Bruce Cutler, who defended mobster John Gotti in three trials in the US in the late 1980s. In his opening remarks for the second of these trials, Cutler threw the indictment against Gotti into a courtroom rubbish bin and told the jury that it was ‘rancid,’ ‘rotten,’ and ‘makes you want to retch and vomit’. Well, Bruce, so does a performance like that.

But all of this raises the question: why don’t we hear about such dramatic goings on in Leeds, Manchester, or Bury St Edmonds? You could argue that the stereotype of the swaggering, theatrical US defence attorney is the product of Hollywood and Fox, yet even in the BBC’s fictional Judge John Deed, barristers are stereotypically aloof, stiff-upper-lipped, and, well, British. Obiter recalls one occasion where a defendant jumped atop Deed’s bench and aimed a swipe at him – our hero successfully evaded and clobbered him back – and that was about the most action we saw in six series.

Is Obiter correct in assuming that UK courts lack the drama of overseas courtrooms? If any reader can set us straight with a tale of hammy courtroom behaviour this side of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, email your story to obiter@lawsociety.org.uk