Face to face: Alured Darlington

For most people, reaching retirement age is the opportunity to drop down a gear and start taking things a bit more slowly, maybe take up something new or do something one has been wanting to do for a long time, like painting or travelling. In the case of Alured Darlington, who won the Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year award earlier this summer, this was the chance to embark on a second career as a lawyer. In fact, this was the seventh career change in a professional life which saw Darlington, accidental Samaritan and tireless learner, work on almost all sides of the profession, latterly as a criminal defence lawyer taking on highly unusual cases.

The beginnings were not necessarily auspicious or easy. The future Lord Denning may have been a long time friend of his father’s but the young Darlington merely chose the law as a career because it would allow him to work for a local authority. Which is what happened, after six years of working evenings for his exams, only to realise that he did not feel like a “real solicitor” – “I had never met real clients and wouldn’t know how to sell a house,” he says.

So he took the plunge and started running a branch office for a Southend solicitor. This first taste of private practice led him, ultimately, to setting up his own firm in Acton in 1965, Darlington and Parkinson, which grew to eight offices in west London. But by 1990, Darlington felt he had explored the limits of private practice. By then, the firm had seven partners, five of whom moved on to become judges and one, the other named partner, Graham Parkinson, the Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate.

From defence to prosecution

In the meantime, Darlington had developed an expertise in domestic violence, which in retrospect can be regarded as the corner stone of a broader involvement with difficult cases. “I became well known in that field because I was working for three local women’s refuges, which allowed us to become quite efficient. I was young and willing to take anything. We would take on these cases when no one else would.”

But on reaching 55, he felt he wanted to do something new and, from senior partner, took a new job as a junior crown prosecutor. “I had to accept a vastly reduced salary but that’s the best thing I ever did,” he says.

“I knew a little bit about criminal law and I was interested in the concept of the CPS. The CPS could be a thoroughly viable and effective organisation and even-handed in its approach. I found that a very acceptable form of organisation.”

Darlington reached compulsory retirement age six years later, but far from relinquishing any further involvement in the law, this was an opportunity to rise to another level. “A partner at a local firm whom I had known for a long time asked if I would be interested in working with them on the criminal side. I said yes, so, in my early sixties, I started doing police station work.”

Reviewing the Aramah guidelines

This is when he started defending drug mules, women (mostly) carrying drugs into Britain. ”My interest arose out of some totally pathetic cases – one about a woman charged with importing cocaine after she had been shown a film in Jamaica, which we found existed, about bringing medicine to people in Britain. She was mentally deficient, with an IQ of 59, and contrary to Customs’ expectations, she was acquitted in half an hour. They had no contingency plan and this woman who didn’t even know where England was – she called it “Foreign” – was left standing outside the Crown Court.” Darlington and his wife Tass took her in, only returning her to Customs after they were able to put her on a plane back to Jamaica.

The real unfairness, however, according to Darlington, is that the Aramah guidelines (the sentencing guidelines for cases of supply of drugs) are not really geared for the Third World. “If people in this country go to prison, their children will be looked after; if you’re from Jamaica, you’re lucky if that happens. And that’s not just your children but it could also be elderly relatives, who will be left to fend for themselves. There is a vast difference and there should be flexibility.”

Darlington and his wife have since been involved in preventive work, with Tass, an illustrator, producing posters which have been sent to schools and churches in Jamaica and Africa, and the production for the women’s charity Hibiscus, of a short film, Eva goes to Foreign.

Since then, the numbers coming from Jamaica have fallen by 90 per cent, although the immediate reason, Darlington says, is the introduction of visa restriction and scanning at airports, “but we like to think that we contributed to this. But there are still areas in Jamaica where people don’t watch television or don’t know what happens out there.”

Darlington’s effort however, could be rewarded after he made representations to the Sentencing Guidelines Council following his appearance in the case of another drug mule, Attuh Benson. “This looked like a potential test case, so I put a skeleton argument to the effect that the Aramah guidelines were not appropriate for the Third World. The judge was enormously sympathetic and said the guidelines should be looked at by the Lord Chief Justice,” says Darlington.

Unfortunately, Lord Justice Rose, who in the past 20 years has always upheld the guidelines, was appointed to deal with the appeal and refused to review them, merely reducing the sentence from 10 to eight years.

However, two months later Darlington got a call from the Sentencing Guidelines Council asking if he wanted to address it about the guidelines. “I went along with the director of Hibiscus. That was only last year and we are still waiting to hear back, but I know it is still under consideration. I felt encouraged. It may well work. But it’s a very big thing for a government to appear to be soft on drugs – even if it’s not, it’s giving that impression.”

• To view Eva Goes To Foreign, go to www.ulimeyer.com/qt_eva.htm