Shamima Begum

[fulabeer]

This country made her. This country owns her. And owes her.

Let her live the rest of her life in peace and quiet, the poor desperate young kid.

 

[Blue and true]

She’s not in this country

And? The poster suggested good people can't receive legal provided by the state. I assume he was referring to British citizens, no?

It was a crock of shit statement.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

Legal aid is available to everyone who can show they can't afford their own lawyer.

That's okay then, you can bankrupt yourself fighting a case or just take the L and plead guilty with a crap lawyer.

Evans could have had legal aid, he decided to pay for his own expensive lawyers because he thought he'd be able to claim the money back if he won, presumably because he didn't pay attention to the bill he voted for.




A lawyer can't enter a plea for you. Only the defendant can do that (or someone legally appointed to make their decisions for them ie parent or carer). Yes, I'm sure there are some lawyers who pressure their clients into taking a guilty plea, but they can't actually do it against their wishes and if they did, they'd lose their career.

Yes I do know that, there's no need for the explanation. But they thrive on their clients not being wise to that fact. If it never worked, they'd never try it on.

 

[domalino]

That's okay then, you can bankrupt yourself fighting a case or just take the L and plead guilty with a crap lawyer.



Yes I do know that, there's no need for the explanation. But they thrive on their clients not being wise to that fact. If it never worked, they'd never try it on.

So just to be clear, you’ve jumped into a conversation about how everyone who can’t afford their own lawyer is offered one to let us know that some people like Nigel Evans who can’t afford a top legal defence still choose to pay for one instead of taking legal aid.

Thanks, but not sure why that’s relevant to Shamima Begum or the false claim that people who need legal aid can’t get it.

 

[Bluemanc100]

And? The poster suggested good people can't receive legal provided by the state. I assume he was referring to British citizens, no?

It was a crock of shit statement.

She's not a British Citizen is she? Nor is she in the UK

 

[hilts]

She is doing it on Legal Aid so we are paying for it, see the Sunday Telegraph article below.

In the post-war period, Britain has been a lenient country, a country of second chances, policing by consent, a gentle approach to the destitute and, increasingly, an insanely generous blindness towards bad actors – so long as those bad actors are minorities (except for Jews).

We have let terrorists out of prison before serving their full sentence, some of whom have gone on to murder. We treat asylum-seeking young men chancing it by the thousands on small boats to perpetual stays in hotels that many legal residents could never afford, without subjecting them to any meaningful vetting.

And yet even we have lines that can’t be crossed. In leaving for Syria, aged 15 and in full possession of her faculties to join Islamic State (IS), a killing machine of global ambition every bit as bad as Hitler’s Nazis, Bethnal Green’s Shamima Begum forfeited her right to British citizenship and the rights that entails. In Syria, evidence suggests she cheered on her new nation’s sprees of mass executions, torture and rape. She swore allegiance to a terrorist enemy army with the explicit aim of destroying the West, including the UK, and replacing it with a nightmarish caliphate. Yet Begum had received nearly £250,000 in taxpayer-funded legal aid, which could have risen to millions with all her appeals.

Well, last week the Supreme Court refused to hear another appeal from Begum, who had her citizenship stripped in 2019, after she was deemed by the then-home secretary Sajid Javid to be a threat to national security.

In February, the Court of Appeal ruled the government was allowed to block Begum’s return to the UK to argue her citizenship case in person. “I won’t go into details of the case, but what I will say is that you certainly haven’t seen what I saw,” Javid had said. “If you did know what I knew, because you are sensible, responsible people, you would have made exactly the same decision – of that, I have no doubt.”

So it’s no dice for the IS bride in Britain. You have to hand it to her, though, for trying to spin herself as someone who, if allowed back in with her citizenship restored, could, as she said in 2021, “very much help you in your fight against terrorism because you clearly don’t know what you’re doing”.

Her apologies – like the creepily, smoothly vacuous self-presentation we saw in the BBC documentary, filmed in the Syrian refugee camp in which she has lived since IS fell – are singularly unconvincing “sorry-not-sorries”. “I am so sorry if I ever offended anyone by coming here, if I ever offended anyone by the things I said,” she wheedled.

The UK’s rejection hasn’t put her off though. Next stop: Strasbourg, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

And, as an embodiment of all that is wrong with the modern Western conceptions of human rights – namely that the rights of terrorists, would-be terrorists and their sympathisers end up outweighing those of non-terrorists and other innocent folk to live without fear of murder – the ECtHR is just the place for her to go. It’s also a reminder of why Britain really ought to break away from the European Convention on Human Rights, full stop (though certainly won’t under Starmer).

There is a long history and rich body of work critiquing the idea of “human rights”. Perhaps most famously, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, observing the floods of stateless people that grew up between the end of the first and second world wars, that “human rights” is a meaningless term in a world in which only nation states are the guarantors of rights and the protection of people – the human herself does not, cannot, float above the nation state, rightly or wrongly.

Less theoretically, the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, is a known obstacle to the swift and just dealing with terrorists, and indeed who we allow in or out of our country. The ECtHR stopped our now-kiboshed Rwanda plan for asylum seekers with a single judge blocking the flight bound for Africa at the eleventh hour.

And as Ben Wallace noted, shortly after leaving his post as defence secretary in 2023, human rights laws are “lunacy” when it comes to protecting the nation from terrorists.

“When we have a threat to the UK, this lunacy of being unable to render people across borders or arrest people in countries whose police forces are unacceptable, means that we are more often than not forced into taking lethal action than actually raiding and detaining,” he said.

Wallace noted that the UK, bound by the ECtHR, could not have raided Osama bin Laden’s villa as the US did. “If there was an IS plot in some Central African country for example, under international law we have the right to take action with or without permission from the host nation, but we couldn’t capture the bad guys – we could only kill them.”

This is the system of justice that mainstream respectable opinion in Britain insists we don’t question, that to pull away from it would render us a pariah state of anarchy and violence. But in remaining bound by the European framework, we show our submission to its governing ideology of pernicious moral relativism. On the broadest level, too many are left to get away with conspiring against us, from within and without, while on the streets, law and order feels patchy, at best, often two-tier in appearance and is clearly overstretched, leading to brazen criminality. That’s where the road to anarchy lies, not in pulling free of a band of obstructive officials in Strasbourg.

If Shamima Begum gets herself back to Britain through the ECtHR, nobody sensible will be surprised, and the perverse – an increasingly large number – will celebrate.

Yeah but she is dead sorry like and thought it was like going to an all inclusive in Turkey but wiv bigger beards and guns and stuff. Plus she was just a baybee and was proppa conned online by boy band ISIS.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

So just to be clear, you’ve jumped into a conversation about how everyone who can’t afford their own lawyer is offered one to let us know that some people like Nigel Evans who can’t afford a top legal defence still choose to pay for one instead of taking legal aid.

Thanks, but not sure why that’s relevant to Shamima Begum or the false claim that people who need legal aid can’t get it.

He made a global statement. Which was wrong. But you also made a global statement which was wrong.

It's not specifically relevant to Shamima Begum but then an honest reading of his post (which was wrong) doesn't end up with us only talking about cases involving the court of appeal or supreme court on citizenship or decisions made my Secretaries of state.

It would be an honest inference to include criminal cases. And it's still not correct to say everyone gets free legal aid, even on the expanded criteria below.

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2023/06/legal-aid-eligibility-earning-threshold-expanding/

 

[Blue and true]

She's not a British Citizen is she? Nor is she in the UK

But that has nothing to do with good people not being able to receive free legal aid, which is absurd. Any lawyer or legal team representing her will be doing so for reputational gain, it's a huge case and despite the controversy surrounding her any lawyer worth their salt will see it as a boon.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

But that has nothing to do with good people not being able to receive free legal aid, which is absurd. Any lawyer or legal team representing her will be doing so for reputational gain, it's a huge case and despite the controversy surrounding her any lawyer worth their salt will see it as a boon.

You're mixing up legal aid and pro-bono.

She's been receiving legal aid funded by the UK tax payer. But that shouldn't be an issue, we are still a country that follows due process or at least aspires to, or pretends to.

You can't strip someone of citizenship when they have no means to fund an appeal and then not give them funding for an appeal.

It's just not cricket. And you don't have to feel sympathetic to Begum to hold that view.

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

Some providers of legal aid will also churn clients and get them to plead guilty in order to get the most cost efficient claim (for the solicitor), rather than defend them according to instructions.

This is broadly correct, although inevitably a bit more nuanced. Legal aid money is divvied up to the legal representatives when the case resolves: guilty verdict; acquittal; dismissal of case; prosecution offering no evidence (PONE) etc. The bulk of the fee for the advocates sits in the brief, with a much lower daily figure for the trial (the refresher). At the bottom and middle of the profession the biggest billers are the ones who are adept at ‘cracking’ their punters i.e.persuading them to plead guilty at an early stage in proceedings. That means the brief fee is theirs and they can move on to the next case, and so on. Because of the systems of returns, this is frequently the next day and so can prove to be a relatively lucrative MO. Trials are time consuming and relatively poorly paid.

The biggest billing juniors in crime are frequently not the best advocates, but those who can churn clients like this. It’s not a case of getting people to plead guilty when they are not, but rather getting people to see sense because they are fucked. It’s a form of sales, as much as being an effective advocate is about being a good salesman. Tell someone they are fucked with authority means it is more likely they will see sense.

At the top of the profession there is an entirely different metric. People who are accused of murder, rape and huge frauds rarely plead guilty. There are various reasons for this, some practical, others societal but that is the reality. And so once you are operating at that level, the ability to crack your punter loses its impact on your earnings, because they are usually not for cracking, no matter how persuasive you are.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

This is broadly correct, although inevitably a bit more nuanced. Legal aid money is divvied up to the legal representatives when the case resolves: guilty verdict; acquittal; dismissal of case; prosecution offering no evidence (PONE) etc. The bulk of the fee for the advocates sits in the brief, with a much lower daily figure for the trial (the refresher). At the bottom and middle of the profession the biggest billers are the ones who are adept at ‘cracking’ their punters i.e.persuading them to plead guilty at an early stage in proceedings. That means the brief fee is theirs and they can move on to the next case, and so on. Because of the systems of returns, this is frequently the next day and so can prove to be a relatively lucrative MO. Trials are time consuming and relatively poorly paid.

The biggest billing juniors in crime are frequently not the best advocates, but those who can churn clients like this. It’s not a case of getting people to plead guilty when they are not, but rather getting people to see sense because they are fucked. It’s a form of sales, as much as being an effective advocate is about being a good salesman. Tell someone they are fucked with authority means it is more likely they will see sense.

But in some circumstances it isn't a case of seeing sense as there's a compelling defence to the charges but it needs the legwork which some firms would rather not do. E.g. getting mental health evidence (I'm not talking about serious crimes like murder which you have already covered below).

And the worst churners are inevitably the same personality of people who pressure sell to grannies and churn more often than not, and not only when people are "fucked".

At the top of the profession there is an entirely different metric. People who are accused of murder, rape and huge frauds rarely plead guilty. There are various reasons for this, some practical, others societal but that is the reality. And so once you are operating at that level, the ability to crack your punter loses its impact on your earnings, because they are usually not for cracking, no matter how persuasive you are.

 

[Kinkybyname]

I wonder if I would be fazed if I saw her severed head? Probably

 

[Phil1]

I wonder if I would be fazed if I saw her severed head? Probably

Well that escalated quickly…

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

But in some circumstances it isn't a case of seeing sense as there's a compelling defence to the charges but it needs the legwork which some firms would rather not do. E.g. getting mental health evidence (I'm not talking about serious crimes like murder which you have already covered below).

And the worst churners are inevitably the same personality of people who pressure sell to grannies and churn more often than not, and not only when people are "fucked".

I wasn’t talking about firms but court advocates (barristers and HCAs). There are far more dodgy solicitors in crime than those operating at the front line.

That said, not sure why a firm wouldn’t get an expert report if warranted as it’s billable hours and covers their arse in many instances. It’s no particular skin off their nose.

There will doubtless be people who will cross the line, as human beings are involved, but it’s an uncomfortable truth that the overwhelming majority of people who are accused of serious crimes have (there or thereabouts) done it.

Doesn't mean we shouldn’t have failsafes and protections for individuals and more widely for us all as a society, or that the presumption of innocence in court should be in any way eroded, and of course there are exceptions, but that is the reality - and a guilty plea, when it is the right thing to do, reduces the sentence, sometimes considerably, and often enables the defendant to better control the narrative around their offending, both of which are plainly in their best interests.

 

[KS55]

Oh so the problem is entirely invented, got it.

Unless you are aware of some pandemic of people being tried without being offered free legal representation that the rest of the country hasn't heard of?

Legal aid is not universal, despite several claims to the contrary here.

 

[Mr Kobayashi]

I wasn’t talking about firms but court advocates (barristers and HCAs). There are far more dodgy solicitors in crime than those operating at the front line.

That said, not sure why a firm wouldn’t get an expert report if warranted as it’s billable hours and covers their arse in many instances. It’s no particular skin off their nose.

There will doubtless be people who will cross the line, as human beings are involved, but it’s an uncomfortable truth that the overwhelming majority of people who are accused of serious crimes have (there or thereabouts) done it.

Doesn't mean we shouldn’t have failsafes and protections for individuals and more widely for us all as a society, or that the presumption of innocence in court should be in any way eroded, and of course there are exceptions, but that is the reality - and a guilty plea, when it is the right thing to do, reduces the sentence, sometimes considerably, and often enables the defendant to better control the narrative around their offending, both of which are plainly in their best interests.

It's a real life example but It's not something I experienced myself, I was told the churning attempt was made, and this was before brief was appointed and before mental health evidence was collected no reason to disbelieve it.

Charge was eventually thrown out in crown court due to mental health of defendant at time of incident.

Small firm operated by between 1-3 solicitor(s) I think.

 

[hilts]

I wonder if I would be fazed if I saw her severed head? Probably

Dont beat yourself up about it you were probably mind bended or summat by tik tok or u tube. Forgive yourself ooohhhh look ice cream.

 

[Kinkybyname]

Dont beat yourself up about it you were probably mind bended or summat by tik tok or u tube. Forgive yourself ooohhhh look ice cream.

I'll have a bucketful ;)

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

Oh so the problem is entirely invented, got it.

Unless you are aware of some pandemic of people being tried without being offered free legal representation that the rest of the country hasn't heard of?

I spent a year working at the Legal Services Commission, now the Legal Aid Agency, from 2009 to 2010. That covered the change of government from Labour to the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition. Legal Aid certainly was more widely available but even then, two tests were applied before it was granted. 'Means' looked at the applicant's finance and the 'Merit' test checked it was a case that would justify the use of taxpayers' money. But it still wasn't available willy-nilly.

Ken Clarke was the incoming Secretary of State and he was someone I really respected but he willingly agreed to take a huge axe to the MoJ's budget, particularly Legal Aid. It's only available now for a small subset of cases compared to its previous reach.

 

[KPXBLN]

This is broadly correct, although inevitably a bit more nuanced. Legal aid money is divvied up to the legal representatives when the case resolves: guilty verdict; acquittal; dismissal of case; prosecution offering no evidence (PONE) etc. The bulk of the fee for the advocates sits in the brief, with a much lower daily figure for the trial (the refresher). At the bottom and middle of the profession the biggest billers are the ones who are adept at ‘cracking’ their punters i.e.persuading them to plead guilty at an early stage in proceedings. That means the brief fee is theirs and they can move on to the next case, and so on. Because of the systems of returns, this is frequently the next day and so can prove to be a relatively lucrative MO. Trials are time consuming and relatively poorly paid.

The biggest billing juniors in crime are frequently not the best advocates, but those who can churn clients like this. It’s not a case of getting people to plead guilty when they are not, but rather getting people to see sense because they are fucked. It’s a form of sales, as much as being an effective advocate is about being a good salesman. Tell someone they are fucked with authority means it is more likely they will see sense.

At the top of the profession there is an entirely different metric. People who are accused of murder, rape and huge frauds rarely plead guilty. There are various reasons for this, some practical, others societal but that is the reality. And so once you are operating at that level, the ability to crack your punter loses its impact on your earnings, because they are usually not for cracking, no matter how persuasive you are.

What area(s) of law do you practice in, out of interest?