Unrepresented defendants in magistrates' courts
Dear HM Courts and Tribunals Service,
Under the Freedom of Information Act, I am requesting information on legal representation in Magistrates’ Courts in England and Wales
Please could you tell me:
1) The number of unrepresented defendants that have appeared in Magistrates’ Courts, for each quarter in the most recent five years for which data is available, and the total number of defendants over the same periods
2) The above, broken down by both individual Magistrates’ Court and offence type.
For clarity, I am defining the ‘unrepresented defendants’ as those without a legally qualified defence practitioner to represent their interests in court, so the defendant therefore represents themself. However, if you have an alternative definition, I would appreciate this being clarified and would still request this data defined in your terms.
If any parts of the data requested are exempt under FOIA, please respond to as much of my request as possible.
If for any reason you are not able to supply this information, I would appreciate it if you could outline in detail what the specific challenges or issues are with aggregating or publishing this information, or any reason it is not collated centrally by HMCTS.
Please let me know if I can clarify any of these questions further, or help in any way to make this request easier or quicker to answer.
Yours faithfully,
Gideon Leibowitz
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Dear Mr Liebowitz
Please find a response to a recent enquiry of the Ministry of Justice
David Carmichael
On behalf of statistics enquiries
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This e-mail and any attachments is intended only for the attention of the
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permitted. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy all
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