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The Secret Barrister
Personal blog · thesecretbarrister.compoliticswriting
The Secret Barrister is a personal blog at thesecretbarrister.com about politics and writing. Since 2018, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link The Secret Barrister site and its book on UK criminal justice, covering legal aid cuts, underfunded prosecutions and wrongful convictions. Commenters call the book readable and recommend it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Barrister, Blogger and Sunday Times No.1 Bestselling Author
Most-linked posts?
- /4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-05
What Hacker News says?
Do they actually ask that? That's madness. It's really not a valid question -> only a court can determine if you've commited a crime, that's why we call people suspects, not criminals, before they are convicted. For example recently in UK, a group of 4 people have toppled a statue and threw it in the river. This sounds like a crime to any normal person, and they were charged with criminal damage. The accused raised…
Comment linking /2022/01/06/do-the-verdicts-in-the-trial-of-the-colston-4-signal-something-wrong-with-our-jury-system-10-things-you-should-know/
on “Installing a payphone in my house”Submitted Guest Post by Joanna Hardy-Susskind: Attrition as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis Financial Times article is paywalled, and, moreover, the FT didn't actually do any of the investigative journalism required to show this. Private Eye, however, did, and their report is free online: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i... -- Private Eye was very good at banging the drum for many years and eventually the mainstream media cottoned on and -- following that -- several miscarr…
Comment linking /2016/02/02/mr-gove-must-now-hammer-the-final-nail-into-graylings-legacy-and-abolish-the-innocence-tax/
on “Zoom executive charged with disrupting meetings commemorating Tiananmen Square”Submitted You Can Tweet If You Want to (So Long as You’re Polite About It) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's not necessarily about wrongful convictions, though they are included, but I'd recommend reading a book called 'The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken'[1] if you were interested in some of the issues in the criminal justice system in the UK. Things have got so bad recently that criminal justice practitioners have actually been on strike a few times. [1] https://thesecretbarrister.com/
Comment linking /
on “I spent 22 years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit”The UK's budget for legal aid has been slashed dramatically in recent years under the Conservative government under the guise of austerity. This is well documented in the (very readable) book "The Secret Barrister". https://thesecretbarrister.com/ The author claims that the cuts are not even cost-effective, often leading to more spending by government to deal with the consequences.
Comment linking /
on “I spent 22 years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit”There have been significant cutbacks in the criminal justice system in England and Wales over the last decade or so - ironically by the party of "law and order". I can strongly recommend the book by the Secret Barrister: https://thesecretbarrister.com/
Comment linking /
on “Assange Hearing Day 2”Here's the sentencing remarks from the first case: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/publications/committal-for-cont... Restrictions on what can be reported while a trial is happening are common, and not unusual in England. It should be obvious that you cannot, before someone has been convicted, call them a Muslim Paedophiles or Muslim child rapists, and you can't threaten to go round their house. After being convicted f…
Comment linking /2018/05/25/what-has-happened-to-poor-tommy-robinson/
on “A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it”The only mitigating factor is that unlike the US the UK also massively underfunds prosecutions https://thesecretbarrister.com/
Comment linking /
on “Convicted Post Office workers have names cleared”Hang on, are you talking about Tommy Robinson? He interfered with an ongoing criminal trial (putting that trial at risk of collapse) by threatening witnesses and calling the accused, before they had been convicted "muslim paedophiles". He was filming inside the courtroom and intimidating witnesses. He was asked to stop. He didn't stop, and he told police he was going to go to the homes of witnesses. He was arrested…
Comment linking /2018/05/25/what-has-happened-to-poor-tommy-robinson/
on “Does China’s digital police state have echoes in the West?”Last year he livestreamed[1] inside an English court and called the defendents - before they'd been convicted - muslim child rapists. He was attempting to intimidate witnesses. He threatened violence to the defendents and to some witnesses. He was told to stop. He did not stop. That action put the trial at risk of collapsing. He was caught, and given a suspended prison sentence for contempt of court. That judgement…
Comment linking /2018/05/25/what-has-happened-to-poor-tommy-robinson/
on “USA needs law 'a lot like GDPR' says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff”The UK online political discourse leading up to the election is so fucked, we might as well give up and declare truth dead. For instance, take the knife attack mentioned in the article, which was carried out by a convicted terrorist who'd been released from prison. Prominent Labour MP* Yvette Cooper blamed the Tories for his release in a popular viral Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/YvetteCooperMP/status/1200761…
Comment linking /2019/11/30/10-thing-you-should-know-about-the-london-bridge-attacker-and-early-release/
on “In U.K. Vote, Online Disinformation Is the New Normal”This looks awesome, but is a short book much too big to digest in one sitting. It seems full of quite original thought. Yet at the same time, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Redbeard, Rand, Machiavelli, Schmitt, Posner, and most of the important thinkers on jurisprudence seem absent. From the first few dozen paragraphs I get an impression the author has a narrow understanding of the "rule of law" - as a pragmatist -…
Comment linking /2018/06/17/the-big-issue-why-the-law-is-broken/
on “The Myth of the Rule of Law (1995)”
