Martin Maloney (letters, 18 February) considers extraordinary the proposition that ‘no one is a criminal until a court says so’.

But within court proceedings, the proposition is a true one. To Mr Maloney it is ‘just the kind of nonsense that gets parroted when lawyers.... forget that first and foremost they are moral agents, rational beings and citizens of the state’. That is not very helpful.

Those aspects are just the baseline for all of us. What each of us individually brings to society is what is important. If you are a solicitor, that means using the law to help your clients. The law is a precision tool that operates differently from, but maybe complementary to, Mr Maloney’s vague ‘areas of public and private consciousness’.

He continues: ‘The presumption of innocence is a rule of evidence, nothing more.’ It is the basic principle of a criminal trial, the burden of proof. Again ‘assumptions of criminality are made at every stage of the criminal justice system’. There are three principal procedures in a contested prosecution once it gets to court, and if the police and/or the Crown Prosecution Service have made assumptions about criminality then it is the job of the defence lawyers to unpick those assumptions.

The first and the third of the core procedures are the bail application and the sentencing. Though conducted in open court, they are a matter for the professionals. Previous criminality, where it exists, will be adduced by the prosecution. It will not be assumed; it will be written down on a form that used to be known as the 609. In the central procedure, the trial, there will be that presumption of innocence, which is not the same as an assumption. The accused will indeed only be a criminal if the court says so.

This may seem tiresome nit-picking to Messrs Grayling and Maloney, who invoke the ‘public consciousness’ (but whose, the Daily Mail’s?). But it is what our criminal law has been based on for centuries, and to find it scoffed at by a solicitor is a little surprising.

Ian Craine, solicitor (rtrd) London N15