All articles by James Morton – Page 11
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NewsClose shaves with thieves
I was fairly lucky about thefts from the office – yet still had a few scrapes.
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NewsJury’s out in Australia
The conviction of a businessman in Sydney has been regarded as another triumph for bench trial.
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NewsFelons on the bench would be a crime
Does the public really want ex-criminals sitting in judgment over them?
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NewsSome mothers do ’ave ’em
What do a 15-year-old Liverpool boy and celebrity ex-criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read have in common?
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NewsThe wages of crime
Overall, participants in the world’s great robberies do not seem to have lived happily on the proceeds.
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OpinionBoundaries of behaviour
My first day as an agent for the Crown Prosecution Service did not begin auspiciously.
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Nothing for Nothing
The news that more solicitors are turning to crime to keep their practices afloat is indeed terrible, writes James Morton. For far too long solicitors have neglected their businesses at the expense of clients and this altruism has clearly gone too far. But what can be done to reverse what ...
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Torn off a stipe in court
Back in the 1960s, legal aid in criminal cases was in the hands of stipendiary magistrates, in the case of lay magistrates, the clerks of the court. The stipes in particular regarded themselves as guardians of the public purse.
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When science doesn’t have the answer
The sad story of the couple found dead in the swimming pool reminded me of one case which forensic science failed to solve. This concerned New Zealand-born Rhodes scholar and scientist Gilbert Stanley Bogle, who was found dead along with his companion, Margaret Chandler, at ...
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You’ll have had your tea
Last month, I received a certificate congratulating me on 50 years of loyal service to the profession. It was something I considered ironic since I spent much of those 50 years unsuccessfully devising ways to give up the law. Of my admission ceremony I can ...
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The case for the defence
Law-makers have been thinking about abolishing the marital coercion defence since the early 1920s, so suggestions that it will be abolished in some imminent legislation cannot be said to be a knee-jerk reaction to the Vicky Pryce case.
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Arresting development
In the bad old days – which, for the purposes of argument, may be deemed to be the 1950s to the 1970s – justice may not have been certain but it was certainly swift. If he put his mind to it, an individual might appear and ...
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Delivering the verdict
The mess in which the first Vicky Pryce jury found itself really doesn’t match up to the jury that, not so many years ago, used a Ouija board to reach a verdict in a late-night session in a Brighton hotel, writes James Morton. Nevertheless, it ...
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Handing it to the bar
At last I have discovered why, back in the 1950s, barristers did not shake hands with their instructing solicitors. But then they didn’t have lunch with them either. That was known as ‘hugging the attorney’ and was a disciplinary offence.
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Food for thought
The news that supermarkets have put withdrawn hamburgers back on the shelves reminds me of the days very early in my career when I did a bit of prosecuting for a small chain of supermarkets.