You Don't Know Me

Author’s Note

In the course of the last quarter of a century, I have met thousands of people from all walks of life, caught up in the criminal justice system.

One of the things that you pick up quickly as a criminal barrister is that intelligence is not necessarily synonymous with education, nor are the two things always interchangeable. So many times I encountered brilliant young men without a single qualification. Youths who could construct poetry on the spot but who called it rap. Lads who understood difficult legal concepts easily once you broke it down to them and, most surprising of all, boys who could dissect the evidence in their cases like professionals.

This point was brought home to me one day when a young man I was representing was being cross-examined about the location of his mobile telephone using cell-site technology. The case was a serious one involving an allegation of robbery and was being prosecuted by experienced Counsel. It soon became clear that the defendant had so thoroughly mastered the experts’ reports that the Crown could not lay a glove on him. It was at once an impressive display and a salutary lesson.

After this, I always made sure to keep an open mind about all of my clients. I also tried to remember that behind the pink ribbon of a brief lay the freedom of a real person who deserved every ounce of effort on their behalf. One day many years ago, after I finished a closing speech on behalf of a client, a young man accused of dealing drugs, he came to me to thank me for my speech. I remember that he said he was grateful because he felt he could not have said what needed to be said in the way that I had. That stuck with me and over the years I wondered why it was that a defendant could not say what he needed to say. We have the best criminal justice system in the world in trial by jury. Trial by jury itself, being in theory a trial by one’s peers. However, the reality is that young disadvantaged males from difficult social and personal backgrounds are not usually tried by people like them.

I began then to wonder what it would be like if those accused of crimes were tried by people like them. And if that were to happen, how a speech made by such a person might sound. And although I sometimes felt moved by what I was being told by defendants about their lives, and what seemed to me to be the inevitability of their situations, I was unable to express it in the way that they had done to me. My dilemma was how to move the court in the same way that a defendant had moved me.

It wasn’t long, then, before the idea of a novel in which a defendant made his own closing speech was born. The real advantage was that in doing that he could be tried not just by a panel of twelve, but a panel consisting of everyone who could hear him: a panel of readers.

It was important to me in You Don’t Know Me to deal with the real problems faced by those who end up in the criminal justice system. In my experience, a disproportionate number of young, socially disadvantaged men from BAME backgrounds find themselves caught up in the system. I know there will be those who may complain about stereotyping in the book, but gang-life is a reality for some young men in certain parts of the country.

Often young men without the social support usually provided by schools and family are drawn into gang culture from an early age. The gang provides many with a parallel system of order, power, security and status where otherwise there is often a vacuum. Once you create the conditions for the emergence of sub-cultures, but remove the possibility of advancement through education, the criminal gang in a sense becomes inevitable as a route through which aspirations can find fulfilment.

That social reality of gangs was one that I felt it important to confront. I wanted, however, to take care to avoid glorifying gangs in any way. Gang life, in my view, is already over-oxygenated in popular culture and not enough is done to tackle the deliberate targeting of young people by these socially powerful organizations. The main characters in the book are not gang members. They inhabit a space in which they can shine a light on the challenges of resisting pressure from gangs. I wanted the characters to tell us about the pull of gang culture, which I have dealt with first-hand, but I wanted to give them the strength to resist it.

The defendant in You Don’t Know Me has been written in an attempt to explode a host of sterotypes, but in a way that is relatable and realistic. In the end we must confront honestly and critically the world that faces us. Ultimately the backgrounds of the characters are less important than the questions that they ask:

Is justice absolute or are there different kinds of justice depending on who you are?

Is morality absolute or are there grey areas? How do we identify those areas?

When must personal responsibility give ground to personal circumstances?

Is guilt absolute or, for the sake of fairness, should it be viewed through a ‘circumstantial’ lens?

What is truth and does its weight alter in the gravitational pull of deprivation?

Do we instinctively reject the notion of innocent till proven guilty?

How much disadvantage does a defendant face simply by virtue of the fact that he is facing a charge?

Can we ever really know anyone? And how do we set about judging those we cannot properly know?