Who? Paul Mason, 51-year-old partner in the business investigations and governance department at west London firm IBB.


Why is he in the news? He represented 23-year-old William Jaggs, the son of a teacher at Harrow public school. Mr Jaggs had killed 25-year-old Lucy Braham, the daughter of another Harrow teacher, by stabbing her 66 times. He had then tried to commit suicide, stabbing himself 34 times.



The media focused on Mr Jaggs' alcohol and drug abuse. During the trial, however, his defence team said he had not touched any illicit drugs for five months before the crime. In an impact statement, the victim's father blamed both the school and the Oxford college that Mr Jaggs attended for allegedly condoning his drug habit and for not doing something about his increasingly anti-social behaviour.



The court heard from both the Crown and the defence's psychiatrists that Mr Jaggs was in fact schizophrenic and had probably been so since the age of 14. His illness had gone undiagnosed, as was often the case with young men, because the outward symptoms - moody, uncommunicative, frequently volatile - were similar to those of a 'difficult' teenager. But beneath all this he heard voices, and he imagined slights and conspiracies.



Mr Jaggs was sentenced to indefinite detention under the Mental Health Act and is currently in Broadmoor Hospital.



Route to the case: A referral from a family friend of the Jaggs.



Thoughts on the case: 'A terrible waste of two young, promising lives, and two families left grieving... Will Jaggs didn't have a personality defect - he was ill. The usual constraints on a person's behaviour - knowledge of right and wrong, fear of detection, punishment, criticism, ostracisation and the rest - had become "disinhibited" in his mind. He was mad, not bad.



'Once they'd sorted out his medication in Broadmoor, the voices went away and he began to realise the awful thing he'd done. He became suicidal again, guilty at not yet feeling guilty enough.



'In the meantime, no lessons will have been learned. The drug culture is so deeply embedded amongst young people and boys want to follow the herd and do what the others are doing. But then, one doesn't know for sure whether the illness would have developed the same way even without drugs.'



Dealing with the media: 'I made arrangement for Will's parents to be protected from the media, but in fact the media had the sensitivity to leave them alone. The media couldn't talk to Will, of course, which was a shame - he's never had the chance to say he was sorry.'



Jonathan Rayner