Reviewing: A Life of Crime: Memoirs of a High Court Judge by Harry Ognall

The Motive:

Successful criminal investigations usually reach their end in court. But what of those who lay them to rest, the lawyers and judges, the barristers, advocates and sheriffs, that bewildering array of titles used to describe officers of the court? What kind of people are they?

The Evidence:

It is worth stating up-front that the UK contains not one, but three judicial systems, and Harry Ognall describes the system of England and Wales. The systems of Scotland and Northern Ireland each have distinctive features and differences that might easily trap the unwary. For example, if you feature a Coroner in Scottish crime fiction, the book best be set in the distant past. Ognall’s memoir, despite its subtitle, is not solely related to his experiences in the High Court, but covers the high- and low-lights of his entire career, as well as his thoughts on various legal matters.

In Ognall’s early years he remarked upon his dislike of divorce cases and the discomfort he felt playing the legal scapegoat in a traumatic battle between spouses. He recalled his despair related to a contested custody and access hearing where the parent involved used his visitation rights to murder his children and kill himself. It is a depressing fact that such crimes are common enough to have earned their own noun.

From his time wearing the silk of a QC, Ognall describes a number of instructive cases. In one he defended Michael Taylor who horrifically murdered his wife after being subjected to an eight-hour exorcism at a local prayer group. The Anglican priests involved sent him home, telling him he still harboured the demons of “insanity, anger and murder”. Taylor was found not guilty by reason, ironically, of that first demon, after Ognall drew the court’s attention to the impact such an extreme religious ordeal might have on someone who was mentally vulnerable.

Ognall played for the prosecution in perhaps the most infamous UK murder case of all, that of Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. He offers a fascinating insider’s take on the investigation and the trial. Ultimately Ognall’s key strategy was to undermine Sutcliffe’s defense: that the murders arose from a schizophrenic belief in a god-given mission to kill prostitutes. This meant challenging the evidence of an expert forensic psychiatrist and forcing an admission that Sutcliffe may instead have had a sexual motive. This admission may have secured Sutcliffe’s conviction for the murder of 13 women and attempted murder of seven others.

After Ognall moved from the bar to the bench, donning the ermine of a High Court Judge, he found himself pivotal to the UK perception of criminal profiling. He presided over the prosecution of Colin Stagg for the murder of Rachel Nickell (a shocking case that also crossed the table of the pathologist Richard Shepherd). Nickell was brutally attacked in front of her son while walking on Wimbledon Common, and Stagg, a regular dogwalker on the Common, fit a profile put together by criminal psychologist Paul Britton. Britton subsequently helped design an undercover operation the police employed to implicate their suspect. In court, however, Ognall denounced that undercover operation as a “honeytrap” and dismissed the case, only to find himself mired in tabloid-fuelled outrage. Ognall drew parallels between his media firestorm and more recent “Enemies of the People” headlines that some UK justices endured after ruling on Brexit. Fourteen years passed before Ognall was proven right with the 2008 conviction of Robert Napper. Whilst criticism of the judiciary is inevitable, demonisation is surely unhealthy: if we confer a public duty on some to make judicial decisions, they must be allowed to carry out that duty without fear of mob reprisals.

The book makes a plea in favour of the English judicial tradition, seeming to set it against the modern emphasis on human rights in a way that felt a touch complacent to this reader. Of course, I’m relatively ignorant of the legal philosophy that might inform this opinion, so I’ll simply record that I remained unpersuaded. I remained similarly unconvinced by his criticism of non-jury / inquisitorial systems of justice found in other European countries. It is unsurprising that Ognall would find favour with the system he reached the pinnacle of, so perhaps that is why this appraisal felt more partisan than balanced. He claimed the jury system reigned supreme because it allowed twelve members of the public to sometimes set aside the finer points of law to reach a decision. While that may be so, it is a fact that surely cuts both ways. For example, Ognall writes passionately of his strong opposition to the death penalty, but had a UK jury ruled on the matter in any year prior to 2015, he may not have liked the result.

The Verdict:

Not just an interesting memoir but also a look down at crime from the starry heights of the justice system. Ognall thrived in the verbal arena provided by our adversarial system of justice. His ritual of hard preparation for each case arose because he played to win, knowing that courtroom performance might overcome the weight (or paucity) of evidence. But it wasn’t only hard work, with Ognall revealing a barrister-game of injecting inappropriate words into his presentations (something that goes on at even starrier heights to this day). Of course, people will play, even in high-stress occupations involving strange wigs, but the fun doesn’t always last. Despite the endless public fascination with crime, Ognall admitted his retirement from the bench was hastened by the growing monotony of presiding over never-ending criminal cases. Looking back over a stellar career, it appeared m’lud preferred playing in silk to referreeing in ermine.