Stacey : the life, style and trials of a great New Zealand criminal lawyer / David McGill.

Was Roy Stacey as good a lawyer as Hanlon before him and Bungay after? He was, and was more amusing and unconventional. From the late 1940s to the 1980s he was the capital lawyer to go to, including those charged with murder when hanging was the ultimate penalty, such as the Sikh who shot three times an unarmed man and a woman who beat her nagging grandmother to death with a breadboard. He defended the downtrodden and the different: displaced immigrants at the war's end, war-weary sailors jumping ship, slygroggers, bookmakers, brothel keepers like Ma Hallam, backstreet abortionist Flo Radcliffe, truckers fighting rail monopoly, most famously transsexual Carmen from the champing jaws of Robert Muldoon and the powerful Parliamentary Privileges Committee when she alleged one MP in four was homosexual. The casebook of Roy Stacey is a social history of New Zealand emerging from a punitive and uptight era, prodded continuously by a liberal lawyer who liked a drink at any hour with a wide circle of friends from all levels of society and thought the law should let him. Roy was the closest we have come to a real-life Rumpole of the Bailey, a colourful character in and out of court who cared and shared long before it was PC.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.