Career
Called: 1993
Silk: 2013
Richard has experience prosecuting and defending cases of murder, historic sex, firearms and large-scale organised crime. He is a specialist in international crime, corruption and money laundering, and is currently instructed in several international corruption cases.
Before taking Silk he was appointed Standing Counsel to the Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office [2006-2011]. He was the first junior barrister to prosecute in a murder trial leading to the imposition of a whole life tariff: R v Baxendale [2012] EWCA Crim 174.
In Silk he defended, successfully, the oldest defendant ever to be tried in the UK at the time in a series of historic sex trials: R v JM [2015] EWCA Crim 1928. In 2022, at the Central Criminal Court, he represented Jemma Mitchell, an osteopath who murdered and beheaded her friend before depositing the body in Devon. Her case involved the first televised sentence in a murder case, and the first of a woman, in England & Wales.
He acts as approved counsel for the SFO, and prosecutes for the FCA. He receives overseas instructions direct from the DPP in Montserrat, where he prosecuted to conviction a high-profile lawyer on money laundering charges, and is instructed in the prosecution of the Montserrat FA president in a FIFA related corruption case listed.
He is the author of two articles in Counsel magazine: November 2016, ‘The Aged Accused’; January 2019 ‘Gambling Addiction and its Connection to Serious Offending’.
