David Rose, spokesperson for the Magistrates’ Association and chair of the Magistrates with Disabilities Network, has been a magistrate for 29 years. He wears a prosthetic leg to court.
I’m an above-knee amputee, I suffered a severe trauma limb loss in 1979 when I was 23 years of age. I have a lot of experience of being excluded from numerous courtrooms due to wholly inadequate access.
The building that I was originally appointed to was an old medieval building in Maldon, Essex, and it wasn’t accessible. We then merged with another small [magistrates] bench in Witham. I couldn’t get up three flights of stairs to the upper floor where there are two courts so I used to only sit in hearings on the ground floor.
