Chapter 98: The Range
Defence counsel was called Sylvia Achterberg and she had a cold.
We met in a conference room off the robing corridor, with a ticking radiator and a window that did not open.
She was in her fifties, small, and she read for eleven minutes without speaking to me, which I respected.
“I'm going to tell you the worst of it first,” she said. “People do better when they've heard the floor.”
The charge was assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Damon had a fractured styloid process in the wrist and a coccyx injury.
“Category two harm, most likely. Culpability depends on what the jury makes of the collar.”
She drew a box on a sheet of paper and wrote a number in it.
The starting point in the box was thirty-six weeks in custody.
She said the range ran from a community order to two years and six months.
“You are not at the top of the range. You are also not near the bottom.”
“Because of the record.”
“Because of the record.”
She turned a page and read it out flatly, the way a physiotherapist reads a scan.
Age twenty-two. Section 20. A man on a pavement, eleven days unconscious, a full recovery. Two years' probation, completed.
“Spent, in the ordinary sense, twelve years ago,” she said. “Admissible here as bad character if the Crown apply, and they will apply.”
“Will they get it?”
“Probably in part. The judge will direct the jury it doesn't prove you did it. Juries hear it anyway.”
She said the second problem was that I was trained.
“A specialist skill used against an untrained person is an aggravating feature in the guideline. It sits in the same list as kicking somebody on the ground.”
“Say it,” she said.
“The skill is the reason he isn't dead. That's what it's for.”
She made a note. It was the first note she made about me rather than about the case.
Then she told me the good news, which she was careful to call the arguable news.
Damon had put a hand into my collar in front of twenty-two people and pulled downward.
Self-defence was available. Reasonable force, honestly held belief, no duty to retreat.
“The Crown will say a national-level athlete had a hundred options and chose the one that put a man on a floor.”
“I had one option that ended with nobody on the floor and I'd used it eleven times.”
“Then we may need the jury to understand what the eleven times were.”
Ruth looked up. Ruth had wanted the kneelings kept out.
They argued about it in front of me for four minutes in a language I mostly followed.
Bad character cuts both ways. Put in the family's conduct and the Crown says she had a grudge and took her chance.
“There is a version of this trial,” she said, “where we run it on ten seconds in a dining room and never mention the three years.”
“And a version where we mention them.”
“Yes. That version is riskier and it is more true. You will have to choose, and not today.”
She asked whether I understood I could be sentenced on the day of the verdict.
She asked whether I had anybody who could take a bag to a prison.
I said Priya Raman would do it and would want to be asked properly.
She wrote the name down and spelled it back to me and got it right first time.
Right glenoid labrum, torn at twenty-two, never surgically repaired, subluxes in the winter.
“You'll be asked to demonstrate nothing,” she said. “Nobody demonstrates anything in a Crown Court. I want you to hear me say that now.”
“All right.”
“If we get it wrong, a jury sees a strong woman throwing a shape and remembers only the shape.”
I said I had spent twelve years not throwing shapes.
She blew her nose and said that was going to be the most useful sentence anybody had said in the room.
Before I left she asked one more question, and she asked it looking at the papers.
“On the twenty-fifth of December, between him taking hold of your dress and him arriving on the floor, how long was it?”
I said a second and a half. Possibly less.
“How do you know?”
“Because that is the only length of time it can be. Anything slower and he blocks it. Anything faster and I have not finished the entry.”
She wrote a second note about me rather than about the case.
On the way out I stopped in the corridor by the list board.
The board had my name under the twelfth of March, spelled with a K, a court number, and the word TRIAL.
Somebody walked past with a trolley of files and did not look at me.
I stood there long enough for the trolley to reach the lift.
Then I went to work. The shift started at half past five and did not care.