Legal profession
‘An opportune moment to give CILEx a bigger profile'
Courtenay Griffiths QC, the guest speaker at the inauguration of CILEx’s President, Millicent Grant, explains why he will be banging the drum for the Chartered Institute.
About the author
Catherine Baksi is a freelance legal affairs journalist.
As leading criminal silk who has been mistaken for a defendant and a ‘big-time’ drug dealer, Courtenay Griffiths QC of London’s 25 Bedford Row Chambers, discusses why he will be banging the drum for CILEx, racism in the legal profession and why he does not expect to see a black lord chief justice in his lifetime.
Courtenay Griffiths was born in Kingston, Jamaica – the second youngest of nine children (eight boys and a girl). His father was a carpenter, and the family left the Caribbean sun for rainy Coventry in 1961. The young Courtenay Griffiths passed the 11-plus exam, and went to Bablake School before becoming the first person in his family to attend university, studying law at the London School of Economics.
He was inspired to become a barrister by the tales told by his father of Norman Manley QC, a renowned silk in England in the 1930s, who became the first prime minister of Jamaica.
Coming from a poor, working-class background, he says, the idea of entering a profession had a ‘certain kudos’ – something that he says has been lost – as well as having the desire to earn money.
Another motivation was the racism he encountered growing up as a young black boy in 1960s’ Britain. He recalls how his primary school headmaster would refer to him and his brothers as ‘blackie’ and ‘wog', and how, whenever anything happened in Coventry involving black youths, the police would kick in their door and haul his brothers off to the police station.
Such behaviour, at the time when ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ and ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show’ still aired on television, he says, was commonplace.
‘In the 1964 general election, a Tory politician who shares my surname – Peter Griffiths – campaigned in Smethwick on the slogan: ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’ It wasn’t regarded as being racist, it was seen as a legacy of colonialism and white superiority,’ he observes.
In the legal profession too, Courtenay Griffiths encountered prejudice. Two instances stick in his mind. The first in his second-six pupillage, when he was sent to Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court. At that time, magistrates’ courts were run by uniformed police inspectors. ‘I arrived with my briefcase, and approached him to tell him who I was representing. He said: “Defendants sit at the back, mate.” I had to explain that I was a barrister.’ And, adds Courtenay Griffiths : ‘The thing is, he wasn’t even embarrassed.’
Later in his career, when he was working up north, he represented a Rastafarian man and his white girlfriend, who had been beaten up by the police, only to find themselves charged with assault. The couple were acquitted, and they all trooped off to a nearby pub for a celebratory drink with Courtenay Griffiths. The pub was notorious for the drug dealing that went on there. As they drank, unbeknown to Courtenay Griffiths, the police were conducting an undercover operation to arrest drug dealers.
Months later, he was instructed to represent one of the alleged drug dealers arrested. In the surveillance notes, Courtenay Griffiths read the note: 'Well-dressed black man enters pub - clearly a-big-time dealer'. ‘I thought: ‘Who could that be?’ I went back and checked, and it was me! I still laugh about that one.’
Commonly, he says, he would be met with silence in crown courts and robing rooms, and find juries too stupefied to listen to what he was saying because they were astonished to see a black barrister.
‘You could see your words were going over their heads because they weren’t listening or registering what you were saying.’
When this happened, Courtenay Grffiths had an icebreaker. ‘I’d tell the jury: “You see me standing here addressing you, with this black face and this white wig, looking for the life of me like a pint of Guinness.”
‘When I dropped the punchline, they’d look puzzled because they didn’t know if it was a joke or whether I was calling them racist,’ he says. Then he would burst out laughing. ‘Normally it worked,’ he says.
He does not attribute those juries’ response to racism, rather he suggests: ‘It’s more about difference – seeing something outside of their norm, which they found difficult to digest and assimilate.’
Looking at the legal profession today, while things have changed, Courtenay Griffiths says that greater attitudinal change is required.
‘The response to the profession still being dominated by white, middle-class, public-school and Oxbridge-educated men, is the catchphrase answer to “increase diversity”.’
But, he argues, diversity is a ‘shallow concept’, which makes people feel that if there is a disabled person, a woman or a black face it is ‘job done’, while they carry on recruiting in their own image.
Instead, he suggests, the focus should be on equality of treatment and creating a level playing field where all, regardless of the school or university they went to or how they speak, are given an equal chance.
‘I’m interested in law graduates from Westminster University being given the same opportunity as law graduates from Oxford, and that is not happening right now.’
He hammered home this message giving the keynote speech at Millicent (Millie) Grant’s inauguration as CILEx President: the first black person to hold the post. Her appointment, he said, was not a celebration of diversity, but a way to mark the shape of things to come and ‘to pronounce a victory for equality as opposed to diversity’.
Her succession, he said, demonstrates that ‘given equal treatment, quality will win out’. ‘This is not about the cosmetic need for a diverse workforce and profession. This is about equality, that is, equal treatment within the legal profession.’
Millie Grant and Courtenay Griffiths met during a panel discussion for daily legal e-mail bulletin, ‘The Brief’, from The Times, and realised that they shared a lot in common, both having been engaged in youth work in south London. He urged Millie Grant to ‘connect with a generation who may think an entry into the legal profession is beyond them’, and stressed the need for the profession to ‘shed the image of elitism which so stunts the ambition of so many in our society’.
By recruiting in its own image, he said that the profession ‘bestows upon itself a mistaken and misplaced mystique and, thereby, creates an invisible barrier to those conditioned by their social position, and their education, to think that certain professions are outside their reach, beyond their intellect. I refuse to accept that.’
The CILEx route, he suggests, goes a long way to help improve the situation and open the profession up to a wider range of individuals, in particular, those from working-class backgrounds like his own.
CILEx, he says, provides a cheaper route to qualification than university and law school, saving students from racking up thousands of pounds of debt in the pursuit of a dream that most will not realise, and enabling them to learn their skills on the job, which, he adds, is precisely how barristers and solicitors train.
As the chairperson of Urban Synergy, a mentoring charity in Lewisham, where he lives, Courtenay Griffiths frequently visits schools and colleges to encourage students, many of whom want to become lawyers, to study hard and go to university. But he says: ‘From now on, my mantra will be “try the CILEx route – it is much better”.’ As he said in his keynote speech: ‘This is an opportune moment to give CILEx a bigger profile on the legal landscape.’
Studying a law degree remains a decision that Courtenay Griffiths says he regrets to this day. ‘I hated it. I have never been so bored, and I have never used any of the law I learned at university – I developed my skills on the job’.
On the thorny issue of judicial diversity, or rather the lack of it, particularly in the higher ranks, Courtenay Griffiths does not put it down to racism alone, though he suggests that an element remains in the process of selection, which is ‘institutionally not geared to creating a more diverse judiciary’.
‘There are inbuilt and unspoken prejudices which haven’t been shifted, like which university they went to, how they speak, who they associate with.’
There will, he suggests, be a ‘process of evolution’, and some black and minority judges will come through, citing Mr Justice (Rabinder) Singh’s appointment to the Court of Appeal, which was announced in July 2017.
But, he says, low pay, reduced pension entitlements and an increased workload have stripped the senior judiciary of the attraction it once held. And he does not expect to see a non-white lord chief justice or Supreme Court president in his lifetime.
Courtenay Griffiths sat as a recorder for almost 14 years, something which he enjoyed, although he recognised a judicial career was not for him.
He applied after he took silk, and says he did so for political rather than career reasons: ‘I thought it would be good for defendants to see a black face on the bench, but I knew I could never do it full time.
While he says that he has been approached to sit full time and to apply for senior posts, he does not fancy it. ‘It is such a lonely existence, and so socially limiting. Not to put too fine a point on it, some of the people I am associated with socially - if I were on the high court bench - I couldn’t be seen around because it would make front-page headlines because of their lifestyles. And I’m not prepared to give up those friendships.’
Now a role model to many aspiring lawyers, Courtenay Griffiths notes two of his. The first was Guyana-born Rudy Narayan, a barrister in London from the late 1960s to the 1980s.
‘He was perhaps one of the finest criminal defence advocates of his time. But because he was extremely controversial and took on the issue of race in court, at a time when the judiciary and the police refused to accept that racism existed in the criminal justice system, he was not made a QC.’
The second is the veteran barrister Michael Mansfield QC, whose career, suggests Courtenay Griffiths, has also been affected by the causes he has advocated. ‘He should have got silk ten years before he did. He is the outstanding barrister of his generation, but he has never really been given the accolades he deserves'.
Having worked with Michael Mansfield on several high-pro file cases in his early career, Courtenay Griffiths says: ‘He taught me a lot of the preparation skills that made me the advocate I am today.’
Looking back over a career which spans almost 40 years, he has three particular highlights. The first is the first trial concerning the murder of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, which resulted in the acquittal of all four defendants. ‘I was first on the indictment and had to carry out the brunt of the attack on the prosecution case,’ he recalls, including the cross examination of a 14-year-old girl, who claimed she had witnessed the stabbing.
Courtenay Griffiths was vilified in the press for cross examining her, and criticised by some observers, including John Sentamu, the then Bishop for Birmingham, who chaired a review into the Damilola Taylor murder investigation. But he says: ‘Those kids were innocent. We prevented a miscarriage of justice.’ Eventually, DNA evidence linked two others to the killing, who were subsequently convicted of manslaughter.
The second case is the first trial in relation to the murder of PC Keith Blakelock during the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot; a prosecution, he says, that should never have been brought.
The third case is the five-year-long trial of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, convicted before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict in Sierra Leone.
‘It took me out of my comfort zone, and taught me what international criminal law is about. It has nothing to do with the law; it’s all about politics and who wields the power in contemporary world affairs.
‘If you’re weak or from a poor, third-world country you get prosecuted. If you’re Tony Blair or George H W Bush, you can act with impunity.’
Indicting the ICC as ‘totally hypocritical’ he says: ‘While I have represented people before its courts, I have no respect for those courts whatsoever.’