Speaker 1: I'm a criminal defense lawyer. Because of that, I have been called the scum of the earth. I have been lectured by police officers for merely doing my job. My own grandfather, when I told him that I had my first real job as a criminal defense lawyer, screwed up his face and said, what do you want to represent people like that for? I came to criminal defense thinking that I was fighting the good fight, that I was standing up for the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed, against the power of the state. But what I quickly learned is that there is another view of a criminal defense lawyer, one that perhaps holds a greater deal of cultural currency. And that's a stereotype of the wily criminal defense lawyer, the one who would use verbal tricks and scrupulous means, technical loopholes, to make sure that undeserving, guilty criminals are let back out onto our streets. Now even when we're not outright maligned, I find we're at least somewhat misunderstood. When I go to social events, dinner parties, and I know my colleagues have the same experience, I often find that I'm asked a very similar set of questions. Questions that perhaps reveal to me how subtle but pervasive some of the negative views of criminal defense lawyers are, and also betray some of the fundamental misconceptions that people hold about our criminal justice system. So what I want to do tonight, in the spirit of clarification, is invite you all along to a proverbial dinner party. We've had our canapes, we've sat down for mains, the wine is flowing, and lucky you all, you've happened to be sat next to me. And what I'm going to do, over the next few minutes, is give you my answers to the FAQs, the most frequently asked questions to criminal lawyers at dinner parties. So let's start with the really easy stuff. No, it's not like CSI, it's not like The Good Wife, and much as I would love to be the next Meghan Markle, it's nothing like suits. Yes, I do often have to get dressed in those oversized black robes. They are hot, they are uncomfortable, and I actually get stuck on my chair whenever I try and stand up. Let's move on to some of the more meaty questions, and there's a classic, the quintessential that every criminal defense lawyer is so familiar with. How do you defend a person who you know is guilty? Now there's a range of stock standard answers to this, you'll find it in any first year law textbook. It usually goes something along the lines of this, that in a democratic society, everybody has a right to a fair trial, that there is a presumption of innocence, that it is the judge and jury, not for me, to decide the guilt or otherwise of my client. And if we can't protect those rights for everybody, then we can't guarantee them for anyone. Now those are important principles and I stand by them in the work I do, but truthfully I'm not going to spend long on it tonight, because I think it's a kind of boring question. Criminal lawyers have been answering that for centuries. When I'm at a dinner party, when someone asks me that question, how do you defend a guilty person, what I like to do is flip the question. I say to them, the real question is this. How do you defend someone who wants to plead guilty, but who you know is innocent? I can tell you now that that is far and away the more common and pressing ethical dilemma facing criminal lawyers in courtrooms around the country. Now it may sound counterintuitive, but let's not forget that fighting a criminal charge is a difficult process. It can take months, if not years, and involves complexities that trip up even experienced criminal lawyers. Now best case scenario, you're out on bail, so you're in the community, but even then you have a charge hanging over your head, you might be subject to onerous bail conditions. Worst case scenario, you're sitting in jail waiting for a trial date. And when that's your reality, it becomes easy to see how pragmatism or convenience wins the day. And add to that another ingredient that I see only too often in my clients, hopelessness. Just the other day at work, we had this great victory in court for one of my clients. Effectively, she was acquitted of all charges. She'd been charged with assaulting a police officer, when in fact it was she who was unlawfully assaulted in the first place. Now the difficult part of that case wasn't winning in court. As soon as I saw the CCTV, I knew that we had a strong defence. The hard part was convincing my client to plead not guilty and to go to trial. She was on bail for nearly a year, waiting for her day in court, but the thing that she struggled with the most was accepting that her voice, her story, the voice of an 18-year-old Aboriginal girl, would be believed against the word of a police officer. That's the hopelessness I'm talking about. So why do I do this? Why do I flip the question in this way? What's the point I'm trying to make to you? It's that criminal law is rarely about cunning criminals, conniving with their lawyers about how to get away with murder. It is far more about real people, in difficult situations, who may have made a mistake, but who find themselves being churned through the machinery of our criminal justice system. Machinery that's often slow, incomprehensible, baffling, and sometimes just feels unjust. So helping people through that process, however they decide to plead, that's the work of a criminal defence lawyer, and that's work that I'm proud to do. So let's move on to the next question, and this one's a goodie. People look at me and they have a glint in their eye and they ask, what's it like to sit opposite a murderer? Now in my career, I've sat opposite two people who have committed murders and one person who is alleged to have committed a murder. My answer for my dinner party guests is always a disappointingly boring one. It's a relatively ordinary experience. I think when people ask me this question, what they're hoping for is the description of a monster. They want to know what it's like to look into the eyes of evil. Now there may be monsters out there, there may be villains, there may be psychopaths. I'm yet to meet one. And if you thought that our jails were full of them, then you'd be sorely mistaken. What our jails are actually full of are traumatised people, desperate people, people with addictions and the kind of backstories that make you understand why they started abusing substances in the first place. They're full of the poor and the homeless. They're full of people who face mental health challenges or have cognitive impairments and don't have the support around them to deal with those and manage those experiences. To put it simply, they're full of people who call to mind for me the old phrase, there but for the grace of God go I. Now I don't want to oversell it. I'm not saying that my clients are saints. I'm not saying that they're blameless. I'm just saying they're not monsters. They are in fact deeply, deeply human. And that leads me to the final question I want to answer tonight. Sometimes people say to me, but what about the victims? What about the victims? Now you could be forgiven when you walked into a courtroom for thinking that there was a clear dividing line between offenders and victims. There's the baddie. He sits on one side. His lawyer's next to him. And on the other side of the room is the state, the prosecutor, who most people at least think of as representing the victim's interests. Visually, it's a very clear picture. The reality though is far more complex. The prosecution do not have a monopoly on victims. Just the other day for work, I was reading a victim impact statement. It was written by a woman whose house had been burgled by my 19-year-old client. It was a very heartfelt statement. She wrote about the way that my client's crime not only robbed her family of property, it robbed them of their sense of security and safety in their own home. And she wrote this line that really stuck with me. She said that what impacted her the most was her loss of faith in humankind, that she felt that her children had been robbed of some of their innocence. And I don't diminish or belittle those feelings at all. I fully appreciate the sense of anxiety, the sense of invasion that comes when your house is broken into. But it did make me start to wonder, when did my client lose his faith in humanity? When did he lose his innocence or his sense of safety or security in his own home? Was it the first time he saw his dad flog his mum? Was it when his mum started sleeping in his sister's bedroom with a chair jammed up under the doorknob because she was so scared of her husband? Was it when her husband finally went to jail, leaving her to raise five children on her own and leaving my client without a dad? Was it when his mum, who was so destabilised by her experiences of violence, herself turned into substances and followed her husband's footsteps into jail? The prosecution does not have a monopoly on victims. So I think it's fair that a judge that sentences my client knows about the impact that his crime had upon that family. But I also think that it's critical in a just society that my client's story be heard, that his background be believed, that it be taken into consideration. And giving a voice to that story, that's the work of a criminal defence lawyer. So my dinner party companions, what do I want you to take away from all of this? It's really a very simple message. It's that criminal law is rarely about cunning criminals. It's rarely about monsters. It's rarely a simple equation with good on the one hand and bad on the other. And I hope you do take this away, because it has consequences beyond dinner parties and the popularity of criminal defence lawyers. It matters because at their core, those misconceptions aren't actually about me or my job. They're misconceptions about my clients, about the worthiness of my clients. And they're the kind of misconceptions that condition us to respond punitively, to forego mercy so our prison population is only ever growing, never shrinking. They're the kind of misconceptions that make criminals easy fodder for politicians and make even the most sensible law reform proposals an unpopular cause. And they're the kind of misconceptions that make sure organisations like the one I work for, the Aboriginal Legal Service, and other organisations that are dedicated to ensuring equal access to justice, that those organisations are chronically underfunded, as too are our social services, as too are any programs that focus on rehabilitation over punishment. At their deepest level, they are misconceptions that deprive us of the capacity to respond with empathy and with compassion to people who have, or are alleged to have, committed crimes. And for those reasons, I hope we can correct them. Thank you. APPLAUSE