I am not most people’s idea of a stereotypical barrister. I am not a man, I did not go to a top university, and I do not come from a family of lawyers. As an undergraduate, I studied English because I loved the way words transported me into someone else’s life and allowed me to better understand them. And this, I later discovered, is exactly what barristers do, too. Behind the clever arguments spun from the pages of a legal textbook, there is always a human tale. It is my job to help my clients fit their lives, with all their shades of grey, within the black and white of the law by telling their story, and telling it well.

Very often when I tell someone what I do, a wistful look settles over them, and they declare that they always wanted to be a barrister. I sense them imagining stone steps to ancient buildings, leather-backed chairs, wigs and gowns and gilded crests. I try to tell them about the 5am starts, the trains to towns they would never otherwise have cause to visit, the vending-machine lunches in windowless brick rooms, the interminable waiting, the clients who leave without an utterance of thanks, and the ever-decreasing rates of publicly funded pay. But often I do not press this, because I know that that is not what they want to imagine, even if the truth lies far from their fiction.

In my first few years as a barrister, I realised that representing those charged with a criminal offence meant that I was more than just a mouthpiece for my client’s case. I needed to be a psychiatrist, a counsellor, a social worker, a mother, and many other things besides, none of which had appeared on the pages of my law books. I had to learn how to identify mental health problems, signs of domestic abuse, alcohol and drug addictions. I grew to know who might, after court had finished, go home and try to end their life.

But the cases that first asked the most of me were those in the youth court. I would sit with my teenage clients in the hallway of the courthouse, trying to take their instructions for the trial they were about to face as they stared at their phones, or the floor, or anywhere but at me. Our hearings had breaks to maintain their short attention spans, and reminders to use language that my young clients could understand.

When I first met Dominic, he had already turned 18, and so, now technically an adult, his criminal career had moved from the youth court up to the magistrates’ and crown courts. But it was the youth court that had given him his first conviction for burglary, not long after his 11th birthday. In that same year, not yet into his adolescence, Dominic was sentenced twice more, just three months apart. If he had lived almost anywhere else in Europe, he would, at 11 years old, still have been below the age of criminal responsibility. But Dominic lived in England and so, from the age of 10, he was old enough to be arrested and charged. In the three years following his first conviction, another four burglary offences were added to his record. Then, at 14, a period of forced respite came with his first incarceration. He entered adulthood, therefore, as someone already marked – the landscape of his future shrunk to a single pathway, leading in only one direction.

Over the years Dominic had developed – or been taught – an old-fashioned kind of criminal code. Never grass anyone up. Treat the police, sex offenders and men who hit women with contempt and violence, but your lawyers with respect. Burglaries should only ever be commercial, not domestic – it is not right to break into people’s homes. Bigger shops were worth less guilt. But post offices and independent retailers deserved letters of apology. And if you were stupid enough to get caught, then you pleaded guilty – but only if the evidence was there to get you. Whenever I walked down into the bowels of court and to our conference room in the cells, Dominic would stand up to greet me – “Morning, Miss!” – as though I were his headmistress and he was in detention.

But when I was first given one of Dominic’s cases, I did not know anything about him. I only knew that he had been charged with assaulting three police officers, and that his solicitor would pay me £125 to set off to Oxford magistrates’ court for the next two days to represent him at trial. As I read through the case papers, my heart sank. By then 19, Dominic had as many pages of previous convictions as years of life.

He would surely have to plead guilty, I thought. There is no trial so hopeless as one in which five police officers are giving evidence against a 19-year-old with whom they are so familiar that all are on first-name terms.

Two days later, I walked towards Oxford magistrates’ court, preparing myself to do what I could, in the hour we had before his case began, to persuade my client to plead guilty. But then I met Dominic. He had a frenetic energy to him, but he listened carefully as I went through the evidence and tested the version of events he had told the solicitors.

Dominic’s case was simple: it was the officers who had assaulted him, not the other way round. He had been drinking in town with some friends, celebrating his birthday. He heard a police officer call out to him, summoning him over, but instead of obliging he ran away, for no reason other than that he did not want to be stopped and searched, again. The police followed him, threw him to the ground, and then kicked and punched him. His friend Caz ran after the police when they gave chase, and when she saw the officers on top of Dominic, she tried to pull them off. When their attention turned to Caz, Dominic saw his moment and tried to escape. But with his handcuffed wrists still behind his back, he was soon caught by the officers. They put him on the ground again and sprayed CS gas straight into his face, before hustling him into a police van and arresting him for assault.

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I glanced at my notebook and the chart that I had prepared of the officers’ evidence, sighed, and warned Dominic to prepare himself to be disbelieved. But he did not care. If he was found guilty, then so be it, but he would not plead guilty to something he did not do.

Then he reached down and pulled a bundle of photographs from his bag. They had been taken by his sister, after she collected him from the police station the day after the alleged offence. The date and time were stamped on the pictures in red digits. I paused, staring at the pictures, then pulled out the transcript of his police interview, skipping through to the last section. Dominic knew well enough that simply alleging he had been injured by the officers would never be enough, so he had got the interviewing officers to confirm his injuries, on tape. I checked the interview against the photographs. Sure enough, the officers had agreed they could see red bruising and grazes to his ribs, his back and down the side of his face; cuts to the back of his hand; a lump and graze to his right temple; a lump and a cut to the middle of his forehead.

I felt a sort of thrill, as the day began to shift. We left the room, and I went into court alone to show the prosecutor the photographs and tell her that Dominic would plead not guilty. We were going to have a trial.

While I was growing up, the presence of the police made me feel safer. The only contact I had with them was benign. When I became a barrister, my voice and presentation guaranteed respectful treatment from them, even when I was on the opposite side of the courtroom. It was only through defending that I began to see and understand why those I represented often viewed the police so differently.

There are some police officers who view their job as a vocation, and strive to be fair. I have met a good number of them, but I rarely need to test their evidence in court because, for the most part, they tell the truth. Other officers are lazy, but not dishonest. Some will bend and break the rules to ensure that – as they see it – justice is done, but they usually hover just on the right side of the line. As a defence barrister, my experience of challenging police in court usually involves a different type of officer. These are the ones who use their badge to legitimise their bullying, their brutality and their deception. In their witness statements, they lie and exaggerate.

The police in Dominic’s case were made up of this latter type of officer. And on the second day of the trial, their evidence began to unravel. In their statements, the officers said they had suspected Dominic of an offence, approached him, and then chased him when he ran. When they caught up with him, they got him to the ground, and he assaulted them. As a result, they handcuffed him. Caz had tried to pull them off and, when they turned to deal with her, Dominic tried to run away, so they sprayed him with gas and put him into the back of a police van.

In evidence, however, the officers’ attempts to minimise their own actions and exaggerate Dominic’s began to undo them. As each officer described a different version of events, I tried to keep up – circling the evidence in my notebook, and attempting to keep track of who said what.

Then the final officer gave evidence. He was the one, Dominic said, who had put his boot on Dominic’s head and crushed it into the ground, and who later sprayed gas into his face. With every question I asked, the officer turned and addressed his answer to the magistrates with extravagant deference.

“When you caught up with the accused, he was bent over, hand raised, at the end of the tunnel – is that correct?” I asked.

“I don’t recall his position. My aim was to prevent his further escape,” the officer said.

“By taking him to the ground?” I asked.

“Yes, your worships.”

“And just outside the tunnel there was a patch of grass. You say that was where you took him to the ground?”

“Indeed, your worships.”

I paused and looked at my notes. “And tell us exactly, officer, how you detained him on the ground.”

“In a Home Office-approved manner, your worships.”

“Right. And what is a Home Office-approved manner?”

“It is a technique designed to prevent injury, your worships.”

“To you?”

“Yes, your worships.”

“And to the detained person?”

“Exactly, your worships.”

I had him. I looked at the magistrates as I framed the next question. “I see, officer. So, to be clear, using the Home Office-approved manner on the grass would have protected both you and the defendant from any injuries – have I understood this?’

“Exactly.”

I slid my notebook off the photographs. I held the pictures up, watching as the magistrates craned forward to look at the bruises, lumps and cuts in glossy close-up.

“So, officer – can you explain how my client got these, then?”

Later that day, the lead magistrate delivered the verdict. Dominic was found not guilty of all charges. The magistrates had not, of course, explicitly said that the officers were lying. Over the following years I would never hear a magistrate accuse a police officer of lying or of planting evidence, even when the evidence suggested exactly this. The defendant’s vindication had to lie in his acquittal. I glanced behind me to look at Dominic, and knew that, for him, that was enough.

After our first victory, I went on to represent Dominic many times. His crimes were almost always theft, with occasional light violence and plenty of public disorder. He was not, I soon discovered, a good thief. His crimes were opportunist, usually unplanned, and often committed when he was too drunk to think about the trail of evidence he was leaving behind him.

The more I represented him, the more I began to understand that while Dominic might be a terrible criminal, he was not stupid. He would talk me through the evidence, what charges he thought we might persuade the prosecution to drop, which ones he should plead guilty to. He had a working knowledge of the sentencing guidelines to which all courts are bound, and which predetermined his fate with a flow chart to his future. Dominic would tell me which level of the guideline for his offence did, or did not, apply to him. He would point to details of the case that meant the judge could go below the sentence starting point.

His special skill was writing beautiful, heartfelt letters to the court, full of pleas and promises of reformation and his commitment to a life beyond crime, where, having never had one before, he would hold down a job. He wrote with great charm; his spelling and syntax were better than most of the police statements that had imprisoned him, and more than one judge remarked how articulate they were, even if they rarely worked. He was canny enough to check which judge was sentencing him. “Oh, right,” he once said, crunching his handwritten letter into a ball. “He’s had one of these before.”

Dominic had so many court hearings that sometimes barely a week went by without my seeing him. I began to believe that he did not care about getting caught, or about the consequences. Sometimes, on my way home from court, I would gaze out of the train window as dusk fell and lose myself in a fantasy in which I took him away from his life. I would help him find somewhere to live, get him a job, show him ways to focus his energy and rebellion and character. I would indulge myself in this daydreaming, aware that it could surely never work, and that I would surely never try.

Some six years after I first met Dominic, I found myself representing him for the last time, although I did not know it at the time. He was due to appear in court to be sentenced for a burglary spree. He had set out into the autumn night with two friends, drunk and armed with a claw hammer. The three of them had smashed their way into a row of local shops. A dry cleaner: bottom pane of its door shattered, £15.23 in change stolen. Then a Tesco Express: door smashed, alcohol worth £320.21 stolen. Next, a newsagent: cigarettes worth £500 and alcohol worth £26 taken. Then an estate agent and a launderette, where, running out of energy, they left empty-handed, two splintered doors the only sign they had been there at all.

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Dominic knew he had to plead guilty. A trail of blood, fingerprints and DNA had led the police directly to him. However, 12 months earlier he had been sentenced for a different burglary. He had been released from prison halfway through this sentence, as the law required. Then he committed these new offences, with only a month left to go before that sentence expired. This meant that Dominic was immediately sent back to prison, to serve out the rest of his existing sentence.

When the month had passed, we agreed that there was little merit in asking a judge for bail. Dominic had pleaded guilty, which meant he was entitled to one-third off his sentence. We both knew, however, that any judge would look at the guidelines, and his previous convictions, and sentence him to the longest period he could. Dominic might as well stay in prison and clock up some time, which would then be taken off his sentence as time he had already served.

Dominic was still in prison when his co-defendants were joined to his case. He was also still in prison when they pleaded not guilty and their trial date was set. Knowing that Dominic had to wait until his co-defendants’ trial was over before he could be sentenced, I persuaded the judge to grant him bail. By this point he had been back in prison for 20 weeks. Dominic was in grave danger, I told the judge, of spending more time in prison waiting for his sentence than his eventual punishment could ever be. The judge agreed, and released him with a list of bail conditions, a requirement to report at the police station every day and a strict curfew monitored by an electronic tag.

On the first day of their trial, Dominic’s co-defendants changed their pleas to guilty. I did not know why it had taken them months to admit their crimes. I only wanted to make sure that Dominic got credit for all the time he had spent abiding by his onerous conditions while waiting to receive his punishment. Dominic had spent 111 days on remand in custody on these offences, and 176 tagged on a curfew. He had already served a longer sentence than any judge was likely to pass.

I checked Dominic’s date of birth, which was printed at the top of his previous convictions. He had just turned 24 – only eight years younger than I was. The futility of it all, the inevitability of the cycle, crushed me. My fantasy of the life Dominic could have, were he spirited away from his current one, seemed suddenly vain and absurd, and, as I packed the bundle of papers into my bag with my wig and gown, I felt embarrassed to have indulged in it.

In my hand I held Dom’s pre-sentence report. This slim bundle contained a probation officer’s analysis of Dominic: an outline of his life; what remorse, if any, he felt about the crimes he had committed; and details of what sentence the probation officer recommended to the judge. I raised my head as the judge frowned down at me.

“But, Miss Langford, I have read the report. Your client professed to the probation officer to want a community sentence. He said he did not want to go back to prison yet again. He claimed he needed a chance to stop his quite frankly appalling offending and address his alcohol problem, and that he would be willing to undertake any community programme I might make?”

Dominic’s report had been written shortly after he had pleaded guilty, many months beforehand. He had used all his charm to persuade the probation officer that, despite breaching every other community order he had ever been given, this time it was different. He had done various food and hygiene courses in prison, he said. He’d learned to cook for himself when he was growing up, and now he wanted to train to be a chef, given the chance. He really thought he would be good at it. I could imagine how persuasive he had been, how charismatic – how the probation officer must have looked at the guideline starting point of 18 weeks’ custody, then at this smiling young man before her, telling her that he just needed a break, and remembered the reasons she had wanted to do this job: to help people, not to send them to prison. And she had gone back to her office and typed the words: “Exceptionally, I recommend that this should be disposed of with a long community sentence.”

But when Dominic had told her all this, he had no idea that he would, in effect, end up serving more than the maximum sentence for his crime while waiting for his sentence. Now, after months in prison and even more on a tag, the prospect of spending the next year in weekly meetings with a probation officer, attending courses and doing unpaid work – even though he had already done his time – meant that he had, understandably, changed his mind.

I rolled the arguments around, weighing up the judge. “Yes, I realise that my client said that, your honour. But may I respectfully remind your honour once more of the sentencing guidelines for this matter? I fear the probation officer has been wildly optimistic in her recommendation. Your honour will see that for a category two non-domestic burglary the starting point – regardless of plea or previous convictions – is a custodial sentence of 18 weeks. Your honour will also have noticed that my client has already served a sentence in excess of the maximum, and that does not take into account the one-third discount he is entitled to for his early guilty plea. I respectfully urge the court to be careful that it does not pass a sentence which would prove … excessive.”

The judge looked down at the copy of the guidelines I had handed up. He paused, and I wondered whether I should push the point again. The sentencing guidelines were designed to create uniformity between courts, and had largely done so, but they also risked discounting the skills and perception of the judge who has to decide an individual’s fate.

I looked at the judge, willing him to understand my plea, urging him to sentence Dominic to prison so that he could walk free from court today.

“Yes, thank you, Miss Langford. Is there anything further?”

I hesitated, and confirmed there was not, then retook my seat.

In spite of my pleas, the judge sentenced Dominic to a community order: 12 months of supervision to address his alcohol problem, an “enhanced thinking skills” programme, and 120 hours of unpaid work.

When we came out of court, I stood in the corridor while Dominic spat his fury at me. I understood why. The complaints he made were not new: the pointlessness of the brief appointments with the supervising probation officer, crammed into an overloaded timetable, which had offered just enough time to sign a name and ask a few questions, but never enough to pull at the deep and secret thread that might undo the reasons for his offending.

I watched Dominic as he raged before me. He had put on weight in the last year, and the boyishness of his frame was giving way to slovenliness. Something else was different: there was a sullenness to him, a meanness and hardness I had not seen before. I looked at the other defendants, gathering in groups outside the courtroom doors, waiting for their turn, and realised that, for the first time, it was difficult to distinguish him from the rest of them.

A few months later, I stood on the railway station platform after court and listened to a voicemail. Dominic had a hearing in court the day after tomorrow and his solicitor had asked if I could cover it. He had refused to go to his supervision appointments, declaring them a waste of time. The court would be asked to find him in breach of his order and to sentence him for it. As it happened, I already had another case in my diary for the same day. It was a civil case, one that I would usually have wanted to get out of.

A year or so beforehand, I would have found a way to cover Dominic’s case. But the truth was, I no longer wanted to witness his pointless and predictable lurch between prison and court, court and prison. I no longer wanted to watch the justice system fail to help him, and Dominic fail to help himself. It didn’t just make me feel impotent – it also made me feel complicit. I called the solicitor to make my excuses as to why I couldn’t cover the hearing, and tried to ignore the gnawing of guilt in my gut. After that, although she asked me to cover other cases, the solicitor never again gave me one of Dominic’s. I wondered if Dominic himself had asked for someone else because he thought I had given up on him and could not forgive me. But I never found out.

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A few years after I turned down Dominic’s case, I was staying in Oxford on another trial, and went out for dinner with a friend. The restaurant was relaxed and noisy, the staff and diners mostly students. When we finished, I walked over to the till to pay. Behind it was the door to the kitchen, swinging on its hinges as staff walked in and out. As I waited, a girl with a pile of plates walked past me and into the kitchen. I looked up, curious to see the action behind the door. There, balancing against a stainless-steel countertop, I saw – for two long seconds – a man who looked exactly like Dominic. He was wearing a white kitchen jacket and chequered trousers, and his face was in profile as he laughed at someone out of sight. The door swung shut.

I wondered about it for a long time afterwards. I wanted, above all else, to believe I had seen Dominic. I wanted to think that some unknown trigger – something someone said, something someone did – had made him want to change. I knew that this was not what the statistics told me, and I knew it was wishful of me to think it, but I hoped that he – like others I had represented – had at last settled on a life that meant I would never see him again.

Although the evidence in every criminal case is a matter of public record, names and identifying details have been changed.

Adapted from In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law by Sarah Langford, published by Doubleday on 28 June, and available at guardianbookshop.com