Crawley Magistrates’ Court: Both incidents took place in courtroom
An experienced criminal lawyer who made sexualised jokes in a courtroom at the expense of a probation officer has been reprimanded by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).
Geoffrey White said he had “qualified into a culture of ‘robing room banter’ that made light of difficult work by relying on inappropriate humour”.
The SDT found that Geoffrey White’s “attempted humour” was directed at a young female probation officer, and included showing her an image on his phone of a naked woman lying on a table with bottles covering her breasts. Mr White suggested the woman looked like the probation officer.
The SDT said the misconduct “included a bullying element and involved sexualised content and comments” being directed towards her.
Mr White has spent the entirety of his career in magistrates’ court in various roles spanning approximately 50 years. He qualified as a solicitor in 1993 and set up Surrey-based criminal defence firm Geoff White Solicitors in 2008.
Person A was a probation officer for Sussex Probation Service, and she usually spent two days a week at Crawley Magistrates’ Court, where the offences took place.
In the first incident, in May 2021, the court was not in session when Person A saw Mr White “showing something on his phone to the solicitor sitting next to her” and saying “something like ‘[Person A] it looks a bit like you’ and ‘your hair looks the same’” before showing the image to Person A.
“Person A stated that from her brief glance at the picture, it was a photograph of a woman lying down on a table at a barbecue and that she appeared to be naked, with bottles around her”, some of them covering her breasts.
Person A said “she did not know how to react” and “was not sure why” Mr White showed her the photograph, adding that it was “all very weird”.
She felt “awkward, embarrassed and uncomfortable because the person in the picture was naked”. The magistrates returned to the court and proceedings resumed.
In the second incident, in July 2021, Mr White was representing a female client who had been arrested for having sex on a train.
The court was not in session and Mr White was talking to a senior Crown prosecutor.
While “trying to joke about” the offence, Mr White said to the prosecutor: “[Person A] knows all about that, standard probation practice.”
Person A said she believed that Mr White was “specifically suggesting that she had sex on a train all the time”, and that it was standard practice of those in the Probation Service to do this.
She said the comments made her feel “really uncomfortable because it is a totally outrageous thing to say and not at all appropriate”.
She was also annoyed “because it was not the first time that Mr White had made such inappropriate comments towards her”. She reported both incidents to her manager. Mr White apologised to her in December 2021.
Mr White, who described his conduct as “indefensible”, stated that he was “more comfortable in a court room than in a normal social environment and that he had failed to ensure professionalism was maintained during exchanges with others”.
He confirmed that he had not received any specific equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) training or workplace sensitivity training.
In mitigation, he told the SDT that “he had qualified into a culture of ‘robing room banter’ that made light of difficult work by relying on inappropriate humour.
“Mr White acknowledged that the world had moved on and he with it as evidenced by the absence of further complaints since the incidents.”
He was found by the SDT to have failed to act in a way that upheld public trust and confidence, or that encouraged EDI.
The tribunal said the solicitor was motivated by “an attempt to lighten the mood in a professional environment through ill-judged humour” and he would benefit from EDI training.
“Attempted humour of the sort used here by Mr White was entirely misplaced, old fashioned and rooted in the distant past, having no place in a current setting.”
Mr White was reprimanded and ordered to pay costs of £12,000.
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