My personal brushes with the judiciary have been few and far between. As a cub reporter, I was once ticked off at Crawley Magistrates Court by a particularly stern magistrate for chewing gum in court. In fact, I was chewing a pen top, but thought better of putting her right on that detail. And once, while covering a trial at Chichester Crown Court, the CPS prosecutor handed the judge a copy an article I had written and claimed I had committed contempt of court by identifying the defendant. The judge waved away the complaint and my heart started beating again.
A little more recently, though, I was witness to judicial behaviour that I thought if not shocking, at least unacceptable. A barrister had accused her set of chambers of racial discrimination. Although she was being represented in court, she did attempt to address the judge directly on one occasion. Not the done thing, of course. But she was a barrister, so she might perhaps have been given the benefit of the doubt for acting out of instinct. Not a bit of it. The judge jumped down her throat as if he had been waiting for her to stand up all along and ticked her off in a most unpleasant way. Whatever his motivation, from where I was sitting it felt like he had taken sides with the establishment against an outsider.
