For my day job I probably go to court a half dozen times a year. Gone are the days when we'd follow a case for weeks on end, unless they're really big stories (so in recent years, the Babes in the Wood killer and the Shoreham Air Disaster). Nowadays - like yesterday - we turn up cold, agency copy desperately in hand, trying to figure everything out in time to produce something for the camera that night. And every time it surprises me what gems for writers courts are.
Even as a journalist, it's rare for you to be in place to watch stories unfold in real time - and yet that's literally what happens in courts every day, and with tales to spare. Meanwhile, your imagination can run riot. Yesterday, while I was writing my copy up in the foyer this huge dude with a massive holdall (he'd obviously expected to go to jail) was in conversation with his smaller, bewigged, brief. In many ways, one imagined they were polar opposites in background and education - yet the imposing gangster held sway, even though, I learned afterwards, he'd been found innocent of whatever crime he'd been dragged in for, only to be dragged back for contempt after he'd been caught playing with his phone in the dock! He'd refused to give it up so the court would know what he'd been doing - and what had he been doing? Who was he? What had he REALLY done?
My story was about a trucker who'd hit and killed a millionaire driving a vintage 1903 car taking part in the London to Brighton Rally. The trucker had been on his phone 7 seconds before the crash. The millionaire had taken the wrong turn to end up on the M23 driving at just 20mph. Presumed guilty by my newsdesk, I found the trucker's defence lawyer surprisingly effective as he summed up the case, intensely aware - I can confess here - of how my own phone had been constantly calling out to me from the passenger seat on the drive to court itself.
Yet, I'll also confess, in most cases I feel a strange but palpable sympathy for those in the dock whatever their crimes - and I've seen some of the worst - because, even when they refuse the stand, you can sense the weight of their past upon them, the nightmarish enormity of their actions and the choices perhaps forced upon them, and the grim future that most certainly awaits. 'There but by the grace...' I find is my constant court mantra. And then, of course, there's the tears of victims families to dwell on, the red faced defendant's families, the judge, the briefs, the jurors. Courts are filled with CHARACTERS and DRAMA. I'd recommend them.
I usually find that the reports themselves come easy in court. As long as you can fight the drowsiness and boredom of legal speak, the notes sketched down in your pad often come with asterisks ('that's a great line, that's a great line, that's a GREAT LINE!') so when you shuffle them together with the facts as you have them, again dining on the agency copy you're clutching like gold, the script almost writes itself. But on your way out you notice, not for the first time, that the security guard has a 'jingle bells' ring-tone (already!) on his phone, and as you turn round and catch his eye you think, blimey, 'he's a character too'.
Even as a journalist, it's rare for you to be in place to watch stories unfold in real time - and yet that's literally what happens in courts every day, and with tales to spare. Meanwhile, your imagination can run riot. Yesterday, while I was writing my copy up in the foyer this huge dude with a massive holdall (he'd obviously expected to go to jail) was in conversation with his smaller, bewigged, brief. In many ways, one imagined they were polar opposites in background and education - yet the imposing gangster held sway, even though, I learned afterwards, he'd been found innocent of whatever crime he'd been dragged in for, only to be dragged back for contempt after he'd been caught playing with his phone in the dock! He'd refused to give it up so the court would know what he'd been doing - and what had he been doing? Who was he? What had he REALLY done?
My story was about a trucker who'd hit and killed a millionaire driving a vintage 1903 car taking part in the London to Brighton Rally. The trucker had been on his phone 7 seconds before the crash. The millionaire had taken the wrong turn to end up on the M23 driving at just 20mph. Presumed guilty by my newsdesk, I found the trucker's defence lawyer surprisingly effective as he summed up the case, intensely aware - I can confess here - of how my own phone had been constantly calling out to me from the passenger seat on the drive to court itself.
Yet, I'll also confess, in most cases I feel a strange but palpable sympathy for those in the dock whatever their crimes - and I've seen some of the worst - because, even when they refuse the stand, you can sense the weight of their past upon them, the nightmarish enormity of their actions and the choices perhaps forced upon them, and the grim future that most certainly awaits. 'There but by the grace...' I find is my constant court mantra. And then, of course, there's the tears of victims families to dwell on, the red faced defendant's families, the judge, the briefs, the jurors. Courts are filled with CHARACTERS and DRAMA. I'd recommend them.
I usually find that the reports themselves come easy in court. As long as you can fight the drowsiness and boredom of legal speak, the notes sketched down in your pad often come with asterisks ('that's a great line, that's a great line, that's a GREAT LINE!') so when you shuffle them together with the facts as you have them, again dining on the agency copy you're clutching like gold, the script almost writes itself. But on your way out you notice, not for the first time, that the security guard has a 'jingle bells' ring-tone (already!) on his phone, and as you turn round and catch his eye you think, blimey, 'he's a character too'.
