JOHN COOPER QC
Broadsword of Gibraltar’s Courtroom words | Peter Schirmer
During duller moments in the eight-month trial of the Marrache brothers — and there were many of them — the visiting QCs vied with each other to find the most inappropriate words with which to address the judge. Some of the better ones were “M’ Lud does not need to be a star-gazing astronaut to realise...” or “Your Lordship doesn’t need to be a bookmaker at Epsom to calculate the odds...” We lesser mortals similarly lightened the days — with assessments likening the presentation skills of the leading silks with Medieval weaponry, so that John McGuinness who led the prosecution team was ‘the quarter-staff’’ or ‘cudgel’; Dorian Lovell-Pank, who featured in this magazine last month was ‘the rapier’; and John Cooper who defended Isaac Marrache was ’the broadsword’. All three returned to the court last month to appear in the Marraches’ appeal against their conviction — on the grounds that the judge misled himself — and their sentences. But who was the broadsword whose heavy double-edged approach dominated so much of the action? There are three, or is it four, John Coopers... and there may be others; for the respected barrister sitting opposite me tucking into a fish-and-chips lunch after a hectic morning in court is complex, enigmatic. There is John QC, the jurist and part-time don... There is John the passionate defender of animal welfare and one of the main architects of the Hunting Act... There is John the playwright, author and broadcaster who, in 2009, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts... In their
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GIBRALTAR MAGAZINE • NOVEMBER 2014
27/10/2014 10:15