Woman charged with perverting course of justice told to represent herself in legal first

[Nick Odell]

This story appeared as a couple of paragraphs in the Daily Telegraph
in an article about the Barrister strikes
here:
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/27/barristers-strike-pay-paralyses-courts/>

and is still available online at 23.30 on June 27th

It appeared as a full article in The Guardian at
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/27/woman-charged-with-perverting-course-of-justice-told-to-represent-herself-in-legal-first>

but has subsequently been withdrawn "pending review" but has been
archived and is still available to view at https://archive.ph/V3qWi


My question was going to be: what's going on - that a defendant is
being TOLD to represent themselves? The supplementary question has got
to be: what's going on - that the Telegraph is presumably still
confident in the content of its article but the Guardian is not?

Nick

[GB]

"In one case, thought to be a legal first, a woman accused of perverting
the course of justice in a murder trial at Southwark Crown Court was
told that she must represent herself because there was no available
barrister after she had dismissed her previous lawyer."

She dismissed her lawyer, and I think it is quite common for defendants
to represent themselves after doing that. The alternative would be that
trials could be delayed indefinitely by dismissing lawyers, one after
the other.

It may depend whether the trial has started, or not, but once in
progress it's going to be difficult to get a significant adjournment for
a new counsel to catch up with what's been going on.