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Today the defendants that marked me most were both least and most newsworthy.
The non-newsworthy were a couple of petty criminals who had apparently stolen someone’s wallet from his home and then gone around buying stuff with his card.
The man was a tall, hot-blooded Mediterranean creature with a long face, salt-and-pepper hair, and a black goatee. The woman was a large blonde with a messy clip holding half of it up, a mocking expression on her sour face as the bureaucrats scribbled and typed away, deciding her fate. Audible snorts and ‘pff’s came from the dock to the rhythm of my own inner sighs of exasperation.
This judge was quite nice though, not too much gobbledegook. Always lovely, the lovely Irish. Quite red-nosed, he was too.
The petty criminal pair exchanged a passionate smooch as they were torn away from each other, the woman sent into custody and the man on bail with an express interdiction to communicate with each other – until the poor woman’s hearing in like, three months.
That broke my heart. All they did was steal someone’s wallet and use it in a Sainsbury’s.
The other one was a very cool, innocent-looking Indian fellow in a nice cotton red-gray jumper and black thick-rimmed glasses. He had beautiful, glossy black hair long enough to cover his ears and an absent yet somehow cheeky expression on his face. I heard from the local court reporter he was a regular punter in court hearings, always getting himself into trouble. This time did not disappoint.
The lawyer, sitting a mere three metres from the university student in the dock, mockingly told the prosecutor the guy’s defence story. As I looked between the lawyers and the bloke with great concern that the cap-and-robe-clad man hadn’t realised the defendant had come in, he said, “the defendant’s right behind us, but he’s off his head on drugs anyway.”
The guy didn’t seem “off his head”, maybe he’d smoked a joint or something. He seemed very much lucid enough to plead not guilty to both strange charges.
They say he tried to frighten the lights out of a pack of estate agents at their place of work by “singing his way through the door with an item with wires and duct tape, with intent to induce belief it would ignite, causing personal injury or property damage” - Because despite the immense post-lockdown backlog of cases to get through, we still have an inordinate amount of time to give to overly populating our sentences with redundant and repetitive clutter, speaking a language only we know fluently and the other peasants in the room sort of catch the gist of if they really focus.
Mr Defence stood and clarified that actually, the defendant had just shoplifted a couple aftershave bottles, nipped in to the Sainsbury’s for some free duct tape, and sauntered into the letting agency by accident. The confused property man made a mistake and panicked needlessly, probably because it would get him out of work that day, or possibly racism.
...Defence man didn’t actually say that last bit. But he did say the quiet glossy-headed man was holding his trousers up with a shoestring, that’s the “wires” bit I suppose.
It’s good, now the guy has to wait in prison until February. The real punishment is the insane waiting period for hearings and trials.
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