It is the perennial and no doubt the most tiresome 'dinner party' question that has to be endured by all criminal defence solicitors.

It goes something along these lines: 'But how can you act for that paedophile/murderer/rapist?'Earlier this month, Anne Ball, the solicitor for serial killer Dr Harold Shipman and a partner at healthcare specialists Hempsons' Manchester office, offered the Gazette as good an answer as any.

No one would criticise a doctor for giving Shipman medical treatment or a newsagent for selling him a magazine.

'I may turn a client away because their work is not the sort of work I do, but I don't turn clients away because I don't like the sound of their story,' she said.Sent iments which strike a chord with solicitor-advocate Kerry Macgill, a member of the Law Society Council, who represented the country's most notorious serial killer Peter Sutcliffe.

He admits to a moment's hesitation over the decision to represent the infamous Yorkshire Ripper, who was jailed in 1981 for murdering 13 women.

'But only for a moment,' he adds.Using a similar medical analogy, he says solicitors should have the same professional detachment as doctors or pathologists.

You would not expect a doctor to turn away 'nasty spotty patients' and, likewise, solicitors should not pick and chose their clients.

And if you have difficulties with that concept perhaps criminal defence work is not for you, he suggests.

Try conveyancing or something less confrontational.The press interest in these notorious cases is relentless, and the line between ghoulish voyeurism and reporting in the public interest is particularly indistinct.

The phrase 'cheque-book' journalism was coined during the Yorkshire Ripper trial.

Mr Macgill recalls that his hardest job was not advising his client on the law but keeping the press at bay.Two years before, a jury had cleared the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe of conspiracy and incitement to murder after being told that key prosecution witness Peter Bessell had struck a deal with the Sunday Telegraph.

Mr Bessell was to get £50,000 for his post-trial account and only half that amount if Thorpe was acquitted.

Mr Macgill recalls offers of six-figure deals being shoved into his pockets in a scrum of journalists outside Sonia Sutcliffe's house.

He refused to reply to any such requests and issued a press release through the Press Association saying that no deal was to be struck.

His advice is 'play everyone with a straight bat'.

Coverage of the Shipman trial in the press brought these experiences to mind.

Not much has changed in 20 years, he observes.At the end of last year the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, called for a crack-down on the payment of witnesses when the sex abuse charges against the pop singer Gary Glitter collapsed after the woman who accused the singer stood to gain £25,000 from a tabloid if he was convicted.

Earlier this month, Lord Irvine announced that the government will the law of contempt relating to payments to witnesses, and pre-publication in the media of information in criminal trials.The same issues beset the trials of Frederick and Rosemary West.

Sole practitioner Leo Goatley first met the Wests on the duty solicitor scheme in 1992 in a child abuse inquiry, some years before it was revealed that they had abused and murdered a series of young people, including some of their own children, in their house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.

He recalls that it was a 'bombshell' when his client Rosemary West was accused of murder at a Gloucestershire police station, and an even greater shock when news reached the interview room that her husband had admitted to three killings.

Rosemary was eventually convicted of ten murders.But even as the body count increased, Mr Goatley was never tempted to drop the case.

'I always felt that Rosemary West's situation was very different to Fred's, and there was always a question mark as to exactly what her involvement was.' The public horror and press hysteria intensified and there was a point -- when Fred West committed suicide -- when it became 'overwhelming'.

The telephone was ringing all the time, the press was banging on his door, and he admits to jumping the wall at end of the back garden to give them the slip.

In the end he employed a retir ed legal clerk ('a nice old boy who was able to give sound bites') to help take some of the pressure off.The solicitor/client relationship is vital in these cases, Mr Goatley says.

'The whole world was against her and outraged to a point that, in my view, became unfair,' he reckons.

Her wooden performance in the courtroom was widely perceived as a shocking detachment from the crimes.

But her solicitor says that her refusal to disclose her own history of abuse in her teens contributed to the disengaged manner.

She was convicted of the murder of ten young girls and women.He still worries whether the jury was influenced by the press assault on his client.

'It's difficult to imagine that they couldn't be,' he says.

Journalists were flashing cheque books like never before and three prosecution witnesses stood to pocket large amounts of money depending on the outcome of the case.

Anne Marie Davies, Fred West's daughter, was to win £70,000 from the Daily Star.

He is considering making an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to reopen the case.Freedom of speech applies to everyone but Rosemary West was not getting her chance, Mr Goatley says.

So he spoke out in defence of his client but was criticised by the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, and the other Lords of Appeal.

There was a feeling that anyone could say what they liked about his client, he says; but she was locked up in solitary confinement, and many members of her family had either turned against her or were involved in press buy-ups.

'I was a mouthpiece for Rosemary and I was criticised for covering her corner,' he says.Graeme Hydari, senior partner of north London firm Porters, represented the paedophile Sidney Cooke, or 'the most evil man in Britain' as one tabloid labelled him.

But the media did not pursue his client because he was so loathed that nobody wanted to hear his story.

When his counsel offered his mitigation before the courts, it lasted one hour 20 minutes but not one word was reported.

Mr Cooke was never going to get any sympathy from any quarter of the press.

Mr Hydari recognises that there is a danger that some criminals can be perceived as so repulsive that they are not properly represented before the courts.

'We would always do our best whatever the allegations,' he says.The trial of the two ten-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, for the murder of Jamie Bulger has raised doubts about whether fair trials can be conducted under the media spotlight in notorious cases.

Dominic Lloyd, the sole practitioner who acts for Robert Thompson, says there is more to the case than 'just an ugly and tragic crime in Merseyside'.

Last year, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that the trial had been in violation of the boys' human rights.

He detects a 'groundswell of change' and increasing unease about some of the extreme opinions expressed at the time.Society has to decide how it wants to treat its juvenile offenders, he says.

Rehabilitation should be the primary aim of the criminal justice system when dealing with people as young as his client.

But the punitive tariff system runs against the interests of rehabilitation.

The solicitor is in regular contact with his client -- this week, he has received five postcards -- and he says every day is punishment.What everyone remembers about the Bulger case -- other than the horrendous murder -- were the ugly scenes as stunned members of the public voiced their fury outside the court.

Mr Lloyd, who lives in Merseyside, says that, following the Court's sympathetic ruling, the re have been threats and hate mail at his office.

At a barbecue he attended, a guest tried to 'have a go' but, fortunately, someone stepped in and broke it up.

'I was a bit flabbergasted,' he says; but he adds that he is not concerned about what people think.He was running the branch office of his firm when he took on Thompson as a client and he feels there was a 'certain reluctance' from his fellow solicitors.

He has left because of what he calls 'artistic differences' and practises on his own.Such were the horrors of the revelations about Cromwell Street that they were bound to deeply affect anyone who was involved in the trial.

Mr Goatley says it helped being in contact with other professionals -- such as the police, Crown Prosecution Service, and medics -- who also had to cope with the horrors.

But he adds that it was shocking.

'It's when the imagination starts running away with what must have happened.'Mr Goatley is a painter and was working on a self-portrait at the time.

It was recently displayed at an exhibition at the Law Society and certainly stood out among the other genteel and rather conservative work.

'It was charged with stress and emotion,' he says.

'Maybe I was catching some of the effect the case was having on me.'So would he act for such a client again? Yes, he declares.

He might not do it the same way, but he would do it again.