75ZT Community

I was forcibly reminded of the years I've been on the Bench today.

I was conducting a remand court and the prosecutor, apart from appearing absurdly young, rang recognition bells in my mind as it were.

Completely at a loss to dredge up any more information from my memory, I asked him where I knew him from. He replied that the last time we'd met had been in the Court but he had been in the dock, as a youth, charged with an offence of violent disorder.

Apparently, I was a winger in that Court when we had sentenced him to twelve months custody. The chairman of that Bench, sadly now deceased, had managed to impress the youth in front of him, to the extent that he completed his compulsory education and chose to go into the law, eventually becoming a barrister.

This is by no means the first time this sort of event has taken place but each time makes up for a lot of the negativity in the Courts.