Since 2010, 258 courts have shut across England and Wales. Whole areas of law, including family, housing, immigration, debt and employment, have been taken outside the realm of publicly funded legal representation, leaving some of the most vulnerable people at the mercy of a system that is designed to be incomprehensible to even the most highly educated lay person. Over the last near decade of austerity, justice has endured the deepest cuts of any departmental spending in the UK. “Despair” is the experience of another in the court of appeal. “Hell” is the word used by one supreme court judge. It is above all a plea to rescue a justice system that has become utterly broken. The book is in part a guide to the system – a reminder of how few of us understand it – and in part a first-hand account of the personal dilemmas facing someone whose professional life is spent in and out of crown courts, police cells and prisons. Following these yellow arrows will bring a test-taker to the end of the maze.This is a portrait of the criminal justice system in England and Wales today, as seen by the Secret Barrister, a criminal advocate who keeps his identity a closely guarded secret so that, he argues, he can be unrestrained in his critique. If the second run is quicker than the first, they pass.Įach door in the maze is marked by a panel with four carved arrows, one of which (the yellow one) is squiggly rather than straight. Upon completing the maze, each test-taker is blindfolded, led to the starting point, and told to complete it again. Test-takers are instructed to ring the bell at the end of the maze, and are assured that they could complete the test with their eyes closed. The second part takes place at the headquarters of The Mysterious Benedict Society, the bottom story of which is a maze of rooms connected by doors. As the shapes on the floor are rectangles, not squares, any method of crossing the room is accepted at the proctor's discretion. A sign in the room instructs test-takers to "CROSS THE ROOM WITHOUT SETTING FOOT ON A BLUE OR BLACK SQUARE". The first is administered in the Monk Building (in the only canon example of the test), in a room the floor of which is decorated with blue, black and yellow rectangles (the latter being very few and far between). The third part of the test, like the others, has two parts. Those who pass are administered the third part of the test. While passing the moral segment is apparently essential, the test proctor seems to have the ability to choose those who pass the test regardless of the test-taker's score on the mental segment. If they refuse this "crib" when it is offered, and later when the impostor puts it within their line of sight, they pass the moral segment. If anyone offers assistance, such as by helping to retrieve the pencil (as George Washington and Kate Wetherall did), sharing their pencil (as Reynard Muldoon did), or by offering another pencil (as Constance Contraire did), the impostor offers to give them a cheat sheet to the test. Before the test begins, a member of The Mysterious Benedict Society posing as a test-taker (in the Society's case, Rhonda Kazembe) drops a pencil down a grate. The moral segment is not announced to test-takers beforehand. Test-takers are told they must answer every question correctly to pass. While the questions are factual in nature, the test is a puzzle: the proctor instructs test-takers to read the entire test before filling it out, and those who follow those instructions may notice that the questions in the second half of the 40-question exam include in their prompts answers to the first 20, and vice versa. The mental segment is a paper-and-pencil examination filled with very obscure questions on science, geopolitics, and the liberal arts. It effectively comprises a moral segment and a mental segment. The second part of the test, which we see taking place in the Monk Building is administered to those who pass the first part, who are instructed to bring exactly one pencil, one eraser, and nothing else. Those who pass are instructed to report to another location for the second part. The grading system for this part of the test is not revealed. The first comprises primarily mathematical questions the second includes personal, free-response, language, and puzzle questions. Benedict's Ad, has two segments, both of which are pencil-and-paper. The first part of the test, administered to anyone who responds to Mr.
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