A ‘Hot Potato’: Defending Exploitation in the Crown Courts

Abstract Chapter 6 focuses on the lawyers and judges who contemplate ‘modern slavery’ considerations in drugs cases. As the most authoritative of state settings where decisions over a person’s liberty are made, the Crown Courts have a duty to prevent victims of human trafficking and modern slavery from suffering undue punishment for offences that they have committed in connection with their slavery. But what this means in practice is up for grabs. Based on court-watch ethnography, this chapter discusses how these issues become the subject of heated legal battles, either as part of an ‘abuse of process’ argument or as part of legal arguments pertaining to the s.45 defence under the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Modern slavery constitutes a ‘hot potato’ for the courts, as different government bodies struggle to pin down what modern slavery looks like in ‘real life’. While defence lawyers describe their clients’ involvement in the drugs economy and with the authorities as evidence of them being exploited, prosecutors use the same facts to frame defendants as criminals who should not escape punishment. Legal contests over the meaning of exploitation constitute, once more, techno-moral processes that entrench, rather than alleviate, punitive logics. These battles become a conduit for state domination as the story of danger emanating from ‘within’ racialized and working-class communities is repeatedly enacted, contested, and confirmed through courtroom arguments.