October 1999 Volume 80 Number 10 "serving the protectors"
QC Calls for Police-Lawyer understanding
By John Ballantyne

The legal profession and the police need to develop better relations with each other, according to a leading South Australian QC.

Lindy Powell, who in 1997 was the first woman to be elected president of the Law Society of SA in its 140 years’ existence, was guest speaker at the August Police Club luncheon.

Powell wants the legal profession and the police to learn to respect each other’s work and to see how much they have in common.

But she admits that this is difficult as both professions have often suffered unfairly from adverse media publicity.

According to Powell, any good publicity for how responsibly and professionally lawyers perform their work “can be undone with one headline of ‘Lawyer pinches $30,000 from trust account’.” She adds: “I rather think the same thing applies to the police.”

She regrets that the media tend to highlight how badly some lawyers and police behave “as opposed to how well the vast majority of us behave.”

Powell is particularly aware of the misgivings many police have about lawyers.

Whenever she delivers talks for internal SAPOL courses, she always encounters officers who “want to know how it is that lawyers can act for people who they know are guilty of offending; how we can continue to maintain ‘not guilty’ pleas when we must know that the person that we’re acting for is guilty.”

Powell describes how work for the legal profession has become increasingly constrained. “There are now jurisdictions which we are precluded from, simply because we’re lawyers,” she says.

These jurisdictions include small claims and areas of industrial work, where “people without legal qualifications are allowed to go in and represent people.”

As monopolies have taken over SGIC and WorkCover work, the amount of damages and compensation available to people injured in vehicle or workplace accidents has been gradually reduced as the role of lawyers has diminished.

Powell warns that, as a result of these work constraints, police will find increasingly that lawyers will intervene, in the interests of their clients, at a much earlier stage in terms of criminal investigation “when, for example, the arrest is about to occur or the search warrant is about to be executed.”

Powell hopes that police and lawyers will develop protocols so that they can maintain a proper respect for their important respective roles.

Powell is hopeful about such a development. She says: “I think the days are long gone where we imagine that coppers lie to convict our clients and where policemen think that lawyers lie to get their clients off charges. I think that those days are gone ...

“We... should try to determine each other’s roles; to try to understand what each of us is doing; and to work, not more co-operatively - because obviously we can’t if we’re representing different interests - but certainly with a greater understanding of what each of our roles is.”

Powell says with pride that she has been a member of the Police Club for some years.

She suggests that just as the Law Society promotes its members with the public, so the PASA needs to promote its members, “not only with the public, but also with the powers that be that control a lot of your work conditions.”

She says that perhaps the most important role over the next decade for both the Law Society and the PASA is “to ensure that people do understand what we do, do understand the different and important roles that we play in the administration of justice, and come to understand that we are not self-interested, but rather that we have an important role to play in terms of delivery of justice.”

If lawyers and police can learn to understand and respect each other’s roles, she says, then, “hopefully, they’ll stop kicking lawyers and policemen simultaneously.”

PASAweb   Index & Search   Top of Page   Comments   Email to Editor

The Police Journal Online is an official publication of the Police Association of South Australia and is published monthly. Editors of kindred publications can seek permission from the Editor to re-publish any Police Journal Online article. Copyright 1999  The Police Association of South Australia sustance