People in actual lives

One of the best recent books of psychology has been written by someone who is not a psychologist. Wendy Joseph is a judge who presided in Court One in London's Old Bailey. With concern for defendants, witnesses, and those who work in the court system, she depicts six trials, put together as new arrangements of events and arguments from the many trials she has seen, so that actual people involved cannot be identified. 

In her court, she has inferred what was going on inside the minds of the people there: the personalities of barristers, the grief of the bereaved, and the feelings of jurors. She has done this with deep understanding, passing on psychological insights to readers.

The book is brilliant and thoughtful. It brings to the fore issues that arise in society when people are disaffected, get involved with drugs, undergo conflict with partners, and sometimes do things that are terrible. Joseph relates that between 1990 and 2007 the English prison population doubled. Although politicians like to increase jail times, the evidence is that this does not diminish the rates of crime.

In the book's introductory section, Joseph illustrates her additional role as a Diversity and Community Relations Judge, in which she promotes diversity in the courts and introduces school children and older students to how the law works. She then helps us to understand the court system via a cast of characters, including the youngster stabbed by someone who was once a close friend, or the distraught parents learning their son had persuaded the driver to speed through the territory of a rival gang to taunt them.

In Trial Six, the defendant is Angela Bridges, married for 20 years to Charlie, a career robber who, after serving one jail sentence of three years, has done so well that he could afford a posh house on the edge of Epping Forest. One day, she sees him in their lounge, polishing and loading his pistol. She reminds him that he'd promised never to use it again. If he did, he'd be likely to lose everything. He hits her in the face, then goes into the dining room, and calls to her to join him for a drink; an act of remorse. Every time he's hit her, which he's done many times, he's always shown remorse. Next Charlie is shot through the mouth.

The ballistics expert finds that the gun was fired by Angela from more than 18 inches away while Charlie was likely to have been sitting down. In her defence, Angela says that she had gone into the dining room, where she and Charlie had struggled, and the gun went off by mistake. For Judge Wendy Joseph, the case is pretty much open and shut, thinking that the ballistics expert's testimony is compelling; not even contested by the defence. She makes extensive notes about legal options open to the jurors and the first, second, and third steps they need to take towards a verdict of murder or manslaughter.

Cross-examined by the prosecutor, Angela turns away from him and talks directly to the jury: not about the law but about her life. She says she knows that Charlie was a bad man. Sometimes he'd hug her, sometimes hit her. She never knew which would happen. She did know, however, that on his next job, he might kill someone. Then: 'Not only would I lose everything but so would someone else – and so would someone else's wife and kids. Charlie Bridges deserved to die and there's an end to it.'

The prosecutor asks if she's confessing to murder. 'No', says Angela. 'I'd be a fool to do that, wouldn't I?'

The jury is out for only four hours. Verdict: not guilty on any count.

In The Concept of Law (1961), H.L.A. Hart explains that we tend to think of the law in terms of its application by police and courts, but these belong in the second of two phases. The first phase in democratic societies is based on the psychological intuitions of lawmakers: constructing general rules for how we should all live together. 

And in 1993 Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie proposed the 'story model' of jury members' thinking. Jurors hear two stories, the prosecution and the defence. They then construct and agree on their own emotion-based story. Joseph shows how, as in the trial of Angela Bridges, this can include empathy for a person in an actual life. And unlike the stories they've heard, a jury's own story has an ending.

Reviewed by Keith Oatley
Professor Emeritus, Fellow of the British Psychological Society