The Wolf of Phillip Street

Drugs and lawyers ... Lawyers and drugs ... Getting busted while on the roll ... The stories that 'come up' at lunch ... Don't forget the CCTV cameras ... From our baby barrister blogger, Unrobed 

AS I sat in court 5.2 one morning last week, I watched the duty barrister addressing the magistrate and realised I knew her to be a fellow baby barrister. She was doing a sentencing plea in a criminal matter and I shifted uncomfortably in my chair as I remembered that her background was in commercial litigation. 

I tried not to react to the squeaks in her criminal law training wheels. It was a sentence for possessing prohibited drugs and it concerned a very pale young man sitting in the front row between his parents. Baby B was going for the top drawer - the section 10 non-conviction good behaviour bond. If I close my eyes, I can see it unfolding again. 

The magistrate's head is down. Nostrils visible and flaring. Not a good look from where I'm sitting so Baby B must be feeling the brunt of it at the bar table. I gather bits and pieces of the facts - the drugs were attached with sticky-tape to his naval and behind his ear in the shape of a hearing aid.

Drug dog Belle took a shining to him while his mates stayed in the line for the festival and waved goodbye. Baby B is pulling out all stops to protect him from a criminal record. 

About half-way through her submissions, the magistrate must have finished filling in the court papers with the sentencing orders, but it wasn't until he started stamping the papers that she realised he had heard enough.

The magistrate's sentence was delivered in the form of a well-rehearsed spiel that went straight for the jugular. Boy oh boy did that boy get a stern talking to.

He was even lectured about Anna Wood, the teen who died in 1995 after taking a pill at a rave in Sydney. Never mind the fact that in 1995 the boy wasn't even born. Or the fact that Anna's death was due to the effects of water intoxication that was secondary to her ingestion of the drug.

Spoiler alert: he received a conviction. At least he didn't get the red "Crim" stamp on the front page of his CV and across his passport photo.

We might be forgiven for thinking the magistrate was unreasonably harsh amidst the increasing awareness of recreational drug use in society and the growing support for its decriminalisation.

Yet the bottom line is that the magistrate was merely doing his job by applying the law, where the law is provided by the parliament. But pity the fool who forgets what is inscribed upon the old sheepskin parchment that Sir Robert Menzies loved so much: nobody is above the law. Particularly those in the law.

It's a dangerous time to be a DPP lawyer who likes to unwind with a bag of the fun stuff. Big Babb is watching. Apparently he's got a special squad of police who have a knack of bumping into DPP lawyers in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And by bumping into, I mean recognising them sitting in the back of a cab, deciding to follow the cab, observing them make a quick pit-stop to approach a shady figure, and then hitting the sirens, pulling them over, and shining a torch into the depths of a designer clutch. Find!

On the other side of the criminal justice system, we have the Marsdens solicitor who was defending his clients in court one morning, and wearing their shoes by that evening.

He'd been cruising around Eastlakes when he was stopped for a random breath test. No sooner had he finished counting to ten, the police were looking inside his car counting a stack of particularly fishy looking sushi containers. By fishy I mean they didn't contain any fish at all.

The next day it's business as usual. There's a new CAN on his desk that boasts several charges of supplying a prohibited drug, possessing a prohibited drug, and possessing goods suspected of being stolen. Except this time it's got his name on it.

The media loves these stories. And we just lap it up - "he should know better ... criminal solicitor indeed ... wasabi burns". 

But I find the best stories are the ones you won't find in the media. They just sort of "come up" at lunch.

Try this with a side of steamed broccoli: A big firm junior lawyer makes arrangements to meet his drug dealers one Friday night. He tells them to meet him outside his work. He doesn't do the exchange there, with over-worked colleagues still filtering out the front doors to go home for a few hours - he's not an idiot.

He brings the dealers up to his office, they're dressed in baggy jeans and white sneakers (they're the real deal) and escorts them into a meeting room. What happens next is unsurprisingly a blur.

The following day he makes an unprecedented weekend appearance at work. He's got a lot of cleaning to do. But that's not the end of it. It never is. Come Monday morning, apparently he's missed a sticky spot or two on a table, but it's the CCTV cameras he'd forgotten about.

There's no denying the prevalence of drugs in our society, and our own kind is no exception.

See you at the Christmas party.