Joanna Hardy writes a guest blog for The Secret Barrister examining how the effects of lockdown has affected the courtrooms.

May 12, 2020

“I haven’t met the defendant, Your Honour,” I tell a screen in my kitchen. Silence. “Can… can you hear me?” My words echo through the judge’s laptop in a courtroom three miles away. I hear them again in prosecution counsel’s dining room. My client, who has never set eyes on me before, sits in a prison just a few streets from my house. He stares at new faces on digital screens and blinks. His prison link is separate to ours. Someone has perched his screen in front of a second laptop in the hope his voice will carry across two devices and into my kitchen. When he speaks, he sounds a million miles away. He might as well be.

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