Australians at work: Jodi Allen, criminal lawyer
She stands up for ‘the mad, the bad and the sad’. But criminal lawyer Jodi Allen couldn’t do it without following some key rules.
Cat guy was everything Jodi Allen needed to know about the darkness of criminal law. She sat with cat guy in a Brisbane prison interview room when she was still an articled clerk, not long out of uni. She’d been reading exhaustive briefs and psychiatric reports on this man, trying to get a handle on his motivations, his background; the story of his crime.
He was living in a block of units in South Brisbane in October 2001. He had been annoyed by the behaviour of his neighbour’s cat. Then the cat went missing. He later told a psychiatrist he accidentally ran over it, then strangled it to put it out of its misery. When an 18-year-old TAFE student knocked on his door in search of her missing cat, he told her what he’d done and she became hysterical. To silence her screaming, he strangled her to death. Hours later, he raped her corpse.
“And we thought, ‘All right, for someone to do that there’s got to be some psychological issues’,” says Jodi, sipping tea in the cafe beneath the Southport Central offices of Buckland Allen Criminal Lawyers where she is director. “So we get a psych report done. First psych report says there’s nothing wrong with him. A second psych report says the highest they could put it was that he had anger management issues.”
Jodi took notes in the prison interview room while a seasoned barrister — old-school bloke, no bulldust — stared into their client’s eyes and summarised his personal findings from the countless briefing notes, police images, forensic assessments, psychiatric reports and background interviews.
“Col,” the barrister said. “You’re just a sick f..k.”
“Yes!” replied cat guy, almost relieved. “I know. I know.”
Then cat guy did the kindest thing he’d done in his life. He pleaded guilty, saving the victim’s family from a trial that would have unpacked every last harrowing detail of a crime the judge described as “depravity and horror of the worst sort”.
“You’ll come across three types of clients, Jodi,” said an early mentor, Gold Coast defence lawyer Bill Potts. “They’ll either be mad, bad or sad. And you just gotta hope that you have fewer bad ones and that you’re helping the mad and the sad ones.”
Mad, bad or sad. Jodi still doesn’t know exactly which one cat guy was. Maybe he was all three.
Rules of the game. Never bring kids with you into court; the magistrate won’t think you’re a loving parent, they’ll think you’re an arsehole for dragging children through hell. Remember always, the court is not about truth, it’s about proof. Remember always, you represent sex offenders at your emotional peril. Remember always, the old secretaries know everything. The old court security guards know everything. If you’re in it for the loot, get out of criminal law and get into oil and gas. And never hear the client’s side of the story before you’ve read the prosecution’s brief of evidence. The client will be desperate to offload their story. Tell them to write every last aspect of that story in a letter and enclose it in a sealed envelope. Then stick it in your client’s file. “Don’t tell me what happened until I’ve read the brief,” Jodi says. “If there’s a loophole in the brief but the client has told me something that fills that loophole, then I can’t use that loophole.”
Never befriend your clients. Jodi had a repeat client some years ago who would send her a Christmas card each year from prison. He was inside for raping two girls he’d picked up hitchhiking. “Merry Christmas, Jodi.” “Season’s Greetings, Jodi.” Then the man was released from prison. Jodi was buying fruit and veg in a local supermarket when her former client stopped her in her tracks.
“Hey Jodi, how are you?” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Just doing my groceries.”
They shared brief updated insights into their lives. Then the man asked, “You want a lift back somewhere after this?”
“No, I’m all good,” Jodi said.
Always wear a smart jacket. Always pack an extra pen and a phone charger. Always expect that 3am phone call from that client standing beside a dead body on the side of the road. Always expect that call from CIB saying your life is in danger because police phone-taps have revealed your client — a drug trafficker — has been targeted by fellow crims concerned he’ll give evidence against them. Never underestimate the weight of human liberty when it’s in your hands. Never mislead the magistrate or the prosecutors. Never let the rapists and the murderers and the paedophiles enter the place in your head where you keep your mum and your dad and the love of your life. And — rule number one — never go back to the muffin factory.
There’s a personalised licence plate resting on a filing cabinet in Jodi’s office: LAW SUIT. “Gift from a client,” she says. “Kept him out of jail a couple times. I’ll never put those plates on my car. Just asking for someone to key it.”
There’s a framed sign by a wide window: Please, no weapons. It was a welcome gift from Bill Potts when she was first articled to him on the Gold Coast after graduating in law and psychology from Griffith University in 2001. Potts was wryly anticipating the types of people who would come to frequent Jodi’s office: bank robbers, husband killers, outlaw motorcycle gang chiefs.
Potts had quirks like that. “Tell me the name of the last person hanged in Australia,” he randomly asked Jodi during a three-day trial period to decide if she could join his firm. Jodi knew the name, it was right there in the back of her mind, but she was so nervous, so concerned with making a good impression, that she couldn’t retrieve it. “It starts with an R,” was all she offered, wilting. And she thinks on that name today but it doesn’t come again. “Damn,” she says. “It starts with an R.”
Potts never played the games of gender and class that she saw in other firms in the top end of Brisbane town. There are still not enough women in criminal law for her liking but two decades ago, she says, it was an “absolute boys’ club”.
“What does your dad do?” asked one esteemed Brisbane lawyer in an early job interview.
“Sorry?” Jodi replied, not understanding why such a question was being asked.
“What does your dad do?”
John Allen sold chocolate and chips. He was a rep for Smith’s crisps and Cadbury chocolate. Before that he was a storeman at a Hoover vacuum plant. Before that he was a promising junior rugby league player for the Newtown Jets in Sydney. He gave it up when Jodi’s mum, Dianne, unexpectedly fell pregnant. “They got married in September 1977 and I was born November 1977,” Jodi says.
She was almost six when the family moved to Tamworth, northern NSW. She was eight when she snuck into the back of a van with her dad and her uncle to go duck shooting. She wanted to have a go at it and her dad reluctantly let her. She eyed a duck and pulled hard on the trigger and a defenceless creature exploded into dust. She burst into tears, inconsolable. It was the unfairness of it all that struck her — the unbalanced scales between girl and duck; the injustice. Amid all her teary exclamations of regret she took some time to clock what her father was saying to her with his arms around her shoulders. “It was a rock, Jodi,” he said. “Your aim is terrible. It was a rock.”
One day at West Tamworth Primary School, a bunch of Jodi’s friends were picking on an Aboriginal classmate. “There was a bit of racism against Aboriginals at that school and that didn’t sit well with me,” she says. “And this one Aboriginal girl always got picked on and I used to really empathise with her.” It was the first time Jodi realised that some people are more up against it in life than others. Some people have no defenders whatsoever. Some people have no representation.
“Nobody talked to her but I was, like, ‘Well, I can talk to you, and no one can tell me I can’t…’ It was always instilled in me growing up, ‘Stand up for yourself, then stand up for others’.”
When she was 13, she attended a weekend talent camp at Lake Keepit near Tamworth. She was there for her excellence in English and drama. At the end of the weekend, her mother picked her up. “Where’s Dad?” Jodi asked, sliding into the car.
Her mum told it straight. “Dad’s moved out.”
Dianne moved to the Gold Coast and Jodi and her younger sister went with her. Jodi enrolled in Year 8 at Miami High and her grades began to slip. She was bored. She was rebellious. She was on her way to the muffin factory. “I was running amok,” she says. “At the end of Year 9 the principal said, ‘Either you have to leave or we have to expel you’.”
By 15, she was living on her own and working full-time. “I wrapped muffins in plastic wrap,” she says. “That’s all I did. I wasn’t allowed to mix the muffin mixture or bake the muffins. I was only allowed to wrap them. Hundreds upon hundreds each day. It was terrible. If I thought for a second I was cool because I had a job and I didn’t have to go to school, that didn’t last long.”
It was her boyfriend at the time — and her partner to this day, Randall Crossley — who convinced her to return to school to complete her junior certificate. Randall’s mum accompanied Jodi to a re-enrolment interview with the same principal of Miami High who’d asked her to leave two years previously. “The principal said, ‘This time you have to follow the rules’. I said, ‘Yep! All right!’, and I got junior dux that year. Then I thought, ‘Well, I better keep going because there’s no way I’m going back to that muffin factory’. Two years later, I was named senior dux of my school. It was all a means to an end. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I didn’t want to work in a muffin factory.”
Rush hour on level two of the Southport Courthouse.Ordinary men and women file in from the street in old running shoes and new leather boots and high heels and slippers. Nobody wants to be in this kind of waiting room. This place is always a low point. Grandmothers with grandsons. Mums and sons. Fathers and daughters. Young blokes with tattoos who keep having to pull their pants up. Mums with strained looks on their faces. Junkies, ex-junkies, junkies in waiting. An old drunk with a toffee apple face barks aggressively at a receptionist. A mum tells her skater boy son to hold his own f..kin’ cup. Jodi recalls the woman she saw walk into this courthouse in a lace skirt and a visible G-string. “All the best with that,” she told herself.
She once assisted a Gold Coast man brought before the courts who would refer to himself only as Captain Fat. He was known to buzz around Southport in a pink tutu and pink angel wings. “So,” Jodi said by way of greeting. “Do I address you as Captain or Mr Fat?’”
Outside a small room off the waiting area, Jodi joins a line of lawyers waiting to discuss matters with prosecutors seated at a long desk inside the room. A prosecution member meets her at the door. She has two matters today, both domestic violence cases. Australian police register 5000 DV matters on average every week. “The familiarity of it desensitises you to it and that’s not good,” she says.
Jodi enters the courtroom off the waiting area, bows before the sitting magistrate. She’s comfortable here. She remembers when she was at uni and she first saw a defence lawyer at work. She watched the lawyer for hours that day; watched them engaging with the bench, negotiating penalties with reasoned arguments, negotiating time frames and details with the prosecutors outside the courtroom. The prosecutors read out the facts and then the lawyer would place a spotlight over each fact, slowly filling in the story of the defendant in question to the point where Jodi saw herself in the defendant’s shoes. “If I hadn’t have gone a certain way, I could be that person,” she told herself.
Rules of the game: everyone deserves fair representation, whatever they’re charged with. That’s how it works. That’s what you tell yourself. You’re just doing your job. You’re just doing your job.
“This one client was charged with sexual assault on a juvenile girl,” Jodi says. “He was in his 40s, maybe. The girl would have been 12 or 13 and I’m cross-examining her mother in court. Different lawyers will have different tactics for cross-examining but Bill [Potts] used to always say, ‘You catch more flies with honey than vinegar’. I always try and have a chat with them in court while they’re giving evidence. Don’t go in hard because they’re just going to get their back up — though sometimes I have to: ‘Witness, just answer the question’.
“But with this mother, I’m talking about the relationship between her child, the complainant, and my client, and the mother starts telling me things that were actually harmful to her daughter’s case but helped my client. She starts crying and I get her a box of tissues and, you know, she starts telling me everything in the courtroom and everyone is watching and I’m meant to be the mean defence lawyer cross-examining everything but instead she’s opening up to me and telling me things and in the back of my mind the whole time I’m just thinking, ‘I’m just doing my job. I’m just doing my job. I’m just doing my job’.”
Rules of the game: the court is not just about truth, it’s about proof. A win is not always a win.
Outside the courthouse, Jodi sits on a stone wall. “I’ll still represent people charged with sex offences, but ones against kids I try to steer clear of. I don’t want to have to put someone else through that and try and justify it to myself.”
Rules of the game: sleep at night.
A text message on her phone: “I’m about to be a grandmother.” That text is a good win. Mother-of-four Susan Falls texting to say one of her daughters is going to be a mum, a phenomenon she might have had to watch unfold from behind bars were it not for Jodi’s representation. “Susan Falls,” Jodi says. “That’s a once-in-a-lifetime matter.”
On May 25, 2006, the Sunshine Coast mum put the crushed contents of a bottle of sleeping pills into her bodybuilder husband Rodney’s curried prawns dinner. When he fell asleep she changed into her pyjamas and got the gun she’d bought for $5000 in a clandestine night-time deal with a man on a nearby football field. She smoked a cigarette, poured herself a coffee, smoked another cigarette, poured herself a bourbon and threw a softball at her husband’s feet to see if he moved.
“I moved the coffee table, pulled up the rug and moved some dining chairs so that I had an escape route,” Susan later told the Supreme Court. “I went up as close as I was game to. I had my arms stretched out and I lined it up against his temple and I fired.
“It made like a pop sound and he made a noise. He said, ‘Ow, ow’, and his arm dropped to his side.”
Turning to hide behind her kitchen cupboard, Susan caught sight of her two eldest daughters. “I asked them if they still loved me,” Susan told the court. “They said they did.”
It was Jodi who pieced together the complex 20-year history of abuse that preceded that night. There were beatings and burnings, nights of torture and the darkest threats. Rodney would drag his childhood sweetheart across the floor by her hair. He would write his children’s names on pieces of paper, scrunch them up and order his wife to select one — a lottery in which Susan would choose which child Rodney would kill.
“We just put in the legwork,” Jodi says. “We subpoenaed hospital records, school reports, spoke to teachers who’d raised alarms. I was tracking down people she hadn’t seen for years and saying, ‘Hi, you might remember Susan Falls, I’m her lawyer’.”
Her team tracked down a cop who’d warned Susan in 2000 that her husband would probably kill her. “We ran self-defence as a defence. Self-defence is where you are defending yourself or others and you do whatever steps you can. Susan had tried everything she could to remove herself and her kids. Her only option, she thought, was to knock him out and to kill him. It was one of the shortest juries we’ve had. They were out 20 minutes and came back with a not guilty verdict.”
Jodi pauses for a long moment. “Yeah,” she says. “I was proud of that one.”
Rules of the game: remember the good ones, learn from the bad ones and always pick up the phone.
“Hello,” Jodi says. “Yep. Yep. OK. See you soon.”
There’s another client waiting to see her at the Southport watchhouse. On the footpath outside her office building she dives into her bag and finds three folders of case file sheets. She’ll work until 7pm, zipping back and forth between her office, the watchhouse, the courthouse and, finally, her house. She will listen to punk rock music on her way home to clear her head of thieves and rapists and murderers. She won’t say a word about her day to Randall. She will want to hear more about his day. She will eat. She will read a brief or two. She will receive a 3am call from a client.
“Jodi, I’ve been kicked out of the casino and they won’t let me back in. What should I do?”
“As your lawyer, I advise you to go get a kebab and take the first cab home,” she will say. And she will sleep.
Jodi’s head shoots up from her handbag. “Ronald Ryan!” she says, elated. She clicks her fingers triumphantly. “Last person hanged in Australia,” she says. “Ronald Ryan.”
Next week: the volunteer
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