52 1GM Thursday August 6 2020 | the times
Law
5
Anthony Ray Hinton is greeted by family members outside prison in Alabama after spending nearly 30 years on death rowMARVIN GENTRY/REUTERSThe top bench
and death row
offer some
‘light’ reading
The best books to entertain the legal brain this
summer, as chosen by our expert reviewers
Thomas Grant, QC
Playing off the Roof
& Other Stories:
a Patchwork
of Memories
by Simon Brown,
Marble Hill, 244pp; £20
In 2012 Simon Brown retired from the
Supreme Court after a career in the law
that spanned more than 50 years — an
astonishing 28 of which were spent on
the bench. Equally remarkable is the
fact that he was 47 when he became a
High Court judge, after five energetic
years as the Treasury Devil.
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Hey-
wood might have been forgiven for
succumbing to that familiar judicial
malady, “judgitis”. Yet, to those people
who appeared before him as advocates
and those now reading his recently
published memoir, it was and remains
apparent that he somehow managed
to immunise himself to any of that
disease’s symptoms.
Can a person who has achieved so
much really be so down-to-earth and
so utterly lacking in pomposity? In
this entertaining memoir Lord Brown
proves one can. Rarely has a legal auto-
biography revealed such a charming
and self-deprecating character. Lord
Brown has written an unstuffy and
brisk account of his life from cradle to
vigorous old age. It bristles with anec-
dote, good humour and vividly drawn
vignettes of the gallimaufry of legal
personalities he encountered.
We encounter George Carman, QC,
turning up late to court, rather the
worse for wear, and straight-facedly
suggesting that Mr Justice Simon
Brown — as he was then known — had
the afternoon before adjourned the
next day’s hearing to 11.15am, rather
than the usual 10.30am (“it was of
course nonsense”).
Then there is Sydney Kentridge, QC,
weaving his magic in the fox-hunting
appeal and Jonathan Sumption, QC,
explaining his purchase of a painting
by Hobbema, which was “bought at
vast expense to compensate for his dis-
appointment at being rejected on his
first application to the Supreme Court”.
A word of warning: to those of us less
able than Lord Brown, the narrative
presented of his ascent to the summit
seems so effortless that his memoir can
inspire feelings of inferiority.
We can only hope that there were
moments of intense anxiety and long
nights of soul-searching: if not for his
sake, then for ours.
Thomas Grant, QC, is a tenant
at Maitland Chambers
Kirsty Brimelow
The Prosecutor:
One Man’s Pursuit
of Justice for the
Voiceless
by Nazir Afzal,
Ebury, 304pp; £16.99
Nazir Afzal’s story of his journey from
childhood to chief crown prosecutor for
the northwest of England takes in his
humble background and a life shaped
by inspirational parents. His memories
of the family drive from Birmingham
to Pakistan — a six-month adventure
— and an unexpected shock on the
return journey are haunting.
Afzal undoubtedly sought to break
barriers between the Crown Prosecu-
tion Service (CPS) and marginalised
communities, and there is much to
admire in these accounts of his activ-
ism. He gives interesting examples of
how his innovative legal brain works in
its prosecutorial approach.
However, Afzal’s self-importance
stretches the book into a distortion of
the criminal justice system. Afzal and
lawyers for the CPS, which is independ-
ent from the police, instructed barris-
ters in court to prosecute the serious
cases, a point that is hardly referred to
in the book. Afzal gives the impression
that he did it all: casting himself as part
of the police, replacing CPS lawyers
working on cases, and replacing junior
and leading counsel in court. He
writes “we were losing control” when
describing riots faced by police after the
shooting of Mark Duggan.
Afzal writes movingly about how he
told a grieving relative of a murder vic-
tim that he was “just doing my job” after
a conviction, but he makes no reference
to the team. At times he is just plain
wrong. He writes of the dangers of the
defence getting a “mistrial declared”.
This does not exist in the law of
England and Wales.
Afzal is entitled to big himself up in
his own memoir, but here his ego often
plunders the criminal justice reality.
I await the Hollywood film.
Kirsty Brimelow, QC, is a criminal
law tenant at Doughty Street
Chambers in LondonCatherine Baksi
The Sun Does Shine:
How I Found Life and
Freedom on Death Row
by Anthony Ray Hinton
with Lara Love Hardin,
St Martin’s Press,
368pp (paperback); £6.99
At the age of 29, Anthony Ray Hinton
was convicted of crimes that he did not
commit and sentenced to death. He
served almost 30 years in solitary
confinement on Alabama’s death row
before being released in 2015.
The only thing that Hinton was
guilty of was being born poor and black
in Alabama, where the justice system
is indifferent to the innocence of those
without means and judges are elected
on the basis of how many people they
send to death row.
As Hinton writes in his book his
prosecution was “nothing less than
a lynching”, where the white robes of
the Ku Klux Klan were replaced by the
black robes of justice.
Hinton did not stand a chance. The
incompetent lawyer assigned to repre-
sent him was paid $1,000 and tells his
client: “I eat $1,000 for breakfast.”
Through three decades of anguish
Hinton paints a vivid picture of cruelty
and inhumanity. He watches 54 men
go to their execution in the death
chamber, which was 30ft away from his
tiny, airless, rat and cockroach-infested
jail cell.
However, this book offers more than
a profound witness account of injustice
and the horrors of capital punishment.
It is a story of loss, friendship and faith,
demonstrating Hinton’s capacity to rise
above his place on death row and the
hell of his circumstances.
Instead of anger, rage and despair,
Hinton chooses love, compassion and
hope. His voice is a testament to the
human capacity for dignity and he
insists that we are all more than the
worst thing we have done.
It takes a civil rights lawyer, Bryan
Stevenson, and the work of the Equal
Justice Initiative, which he founded in
1989, before Hinton can win back his
freedom and the two men walk out
together into the sunshine.
Knowing how Hinton’s heartbreak-
ing and ultimately triumphant story
ends does not make his book any easier
for us to read.
He survived, but other innocent
people have not. In Stevenson’s words:
“The moral arc of the universe bends
toward justice, but justice needs help.”
Catherine Baksi is a specialist legal
affairs journalistJonathan Black
Power Play
by Tony Kent,
Elliott & Thompson,
496pp (paperback);
£8.99
This thriller, which arrived
as conspiracy theories about the death
of Jeffrey Epstein swirled, is far from
formulaic. The author takes us through
a transatlantic game of cat and mouse
as President Knowles of America and
his inner circle try to prevent the expo-
sure of his war crimes during his service
in Afghanistan two decades earlier.
The bombing of Pan-Atlantic Air-
lines flight PA16 from London to New
York carrying Knowles’s presidential
rival, Dale Victor, is a drastic measure.
Secret service agents are deployed on
both sides of the Atlantic to destroy
anyone they believe knows about the
president’s dark secret.
Not exactly an obvious template for
a UK legal drama, but then Michael
Devlin, QC, is brought in to defend
Nizar Mansour, a Syrian refugee who is
being prosecuted for the bombing. At
an early stage of proceedings Devlin’s
instructing solicitor, Will Duffy, whose
reputation was built on representing
London’s leading crime families, claims
that the defendant’s early police station
confession is not what it seems.
Kent brings the secret service’s “men
in black” into the surroundings of
Stoke Newington police station in
north London and the glass-walled
Westminster magistrates’ court, with
its snaking queue at the entrance. The
“pompous” district judge, George Bell,
presides over the first hearing, but his
powers to make any meaningful deci-
sions are limited. Belmarsh prison and
Woolwich crown court also feature.
Kent creates not so much a series of
subplots, but a clever weave of the
seemingly unrelated worlds of the Oval
Office and Belmarsh prison. Enough to
allow any lawyer, whether on holiday
or slogging around the “Nightingale
courts”, a helpful dose of escapism.
Jonathan Black is a former
president of the London Criminal
Courts Solicitors AssociationEdward Fennell
The Last Trial
by Scott Turow,
Mantle, 464pp; £20
Published in the shadow of
Covid-19, there could be
no better timing for the
arrival of Scott Turow’s latest novel,
which features the last trial of the
lawyer Sandy Stern, who is acting for
his old friend Dr Kiril Pafko, winner of
the Nobel prize for medicine.
Set in the present, the plot revolves
around flawed research and dodgy
dealings in Pafko’s pharmaceutical
company, which claims to have made
a dramatic breakthrough in the cure for
cancer. Substitute coronavirus instead
and it captures the mood of today.
References to Me Too and antisemi-
tism also feature, making the story
bang up to date on the big issues.
There is a flaw in the narrative, as
Turow himself more or less admits.
Driving the story is the complexity of
the US Food and Drug Administration’s
regulatory processes — and this is
where it gets bogged down.
In his afterword acknowledgements
Turow writes: “The regulatory frame-
work that governs the clinical testing
and approval of new medicines is one
of unrivalled complexity... The phar-
maceutical regulatory scheme defies
easy understanding... by readers who
are seeking the pleasures of fiction
rather than the drudgery of text.”
Despite his best efforts, Turow gets
bogged down in those impenetrable
intricacies. In fact, open the book on
a random page and you may mistake it
for a legal or medical textbook. Intellec-
tual property lawyers looking to score
poolside development points could find
this the perfect tome. However, the
general reader may never emerge from
the mind-boggling detail, which pro-
vides the context for the alleged crimes.
Once free of the bureaucratic jungle,
the book speeds along as we accom-
pany a bunch of smug, tortured lawyers
and their clients into the sunset. But,
like Covid-19, it’s a relief when it’s over.
Edward Fennell is a specialist legal
affairs writer