Ajay Close: Court in the Act

Few buildings embody the majesty of the law quite so eloquently.

It's almost a pity Perth and Kinross has so few big-time criminals. There's one murder a year, on average, and nothing like the serious knife problem found in the west of Scotland. The major roads crossing the area account for many of the offences. Then there are the rural crimes: hare coursing, egg stealing, polluting rivers, poisoning birds of prey, fruit farms hiring pickers without a gang-master licence. If you're thinking it sounds dull, you'd be wrong. Freelance reporter Gordon Currie has been making a living selling Perth court stories to the national media since 1997. Most murders are boring, he insists. He's looking for quirky stories, and if quirkiness comes with a two-car suburban lifestyle, so much the better.

"There's a whole lot of middle class people in Perth, and the papers love middle-class people misbehaving." The young reporters often ask him which of the five courts they should sit in. "I say, it's much more likely that somebody in a suit has committed an interesting crime."

Perth has its scrotes, the faces he'll see again and again, but fewer of them than elsewhere. When he covered Dundee sheriff court there'd be 95 drugs and shoplifting cases for every five interesting offences. In Perth he reckons 20 per cent are unusual in some way. The fiance banned from speaking to his bride-to-be before the wedding, the man out feeding the birds in nothing but a thong worn back-to-front: it's all money in the bank to Gordon. After 13 years, he can pretty much tell at a glance who's done what. "Women who commit fraud are always fat and middle-aged," he says. "I don't know why, but they are."

It takes a certain stamina to spend all day every day in court. Time moves more slowly. There are long periods of silence, broken only by the creak of buttocks shifting on hard wooden benches. The sheriff sits in his wig and beneath him perch the black-gowned lawyers. The accused tend to be less formally dressed. Or, in the case of the Naked Rambler who appeared before Sheriff Foulis in January, not dressed at all. Though that earned him a three-month sentence for contempt of court. One after another, the men in jeans, trainers and hooded sweatshirts stand up to receive their sentences. The odd face shows a Buckfast tan, others the chiselled cheekbones and mushroom pallor of the drug abuser (scars and earrings optional). Few could be mistaken for the clear-eyed, pink-cheeked solicitors and fiscals, even if they swapped clothes.

Listening to the tales of alcohol and breached bail conditions, the sheriff looks pained but unsurprised. He doles out the fines, probation and community service; defers some sentences, giving the convicted a chance to show themselves of good behaviour; and, less often than you might expect, sends someone to jail. Each sentence is explained, along with the "discount" earned or lost by good or bad conduct. We're all consumers now.

The bailed walk into court from home. Those on remand are cuffed to a security guard working for the contractors, Reliance, and brought up from the bowels of the building. It's another world down there, bitterly cold in winter, and not much warmer in summer. The ceilings are so low there's yellow-and-black hazard tape stuck overhead. The floors are stone-flagged. The air has a stale, disinfectant-tinged stench.

There are five cells, of varying sizes, which have barely changed in 190 years. No reading matter allowed: other courts have had problems with prisoners setting fire to newspapers and magazines. "I've sat in there for half an hour and it's the most boring thing you can do," says a Reliance officer who would rather not be named. Between 70 and 90 prisoners pass through the door every week, 20 to 30 on a busy day. Any more and there'd be a risk of trouble. "You start getting all these guys in the same cell and that's when tempers start to fray."

All prisoners are asked if they have a problem with anyone else in custody. Perth's a close-knit place, everyone knows everyone, and no-one wants two people with a history of fighting locked up together all day. Vulnerable prisoners and those accused of sexual offences are kept in isolation for their own safety.

Minutes later, upstairs again, I'm gulping in untainted air and blinking in the light and space of the sheriff clerk's office, a Georgian assembly room straight out of Jane Austen with a sprung dance floor. The Perth hunt balls were held here into the 1950s. Sheriff clerk Alan Nicol has a dance card from 1949, with the five-course dinner menu written in French but the 2am supper of soup, kippers, sausage and mash in English.

Here his staff administer both the criminal and civil sides of the court's work. One of their duties is recruiting juries. It can be tricky, deciding which of the many excuses they're offered are valid reasons for exemption. Being medically unfit or a farmer in the middle of lambing are fair grounds, but other excuses are less clear-cut. Perth being a doggy kind of place, often these seem to involve pets. One woman said she could only leave her dogs if she drove them up to her parents 70 miles away, and was duly paid mileage to do so.

While so many of working age are desperate to wriggle out of jury service, Alan gets complaints from the over-65s about being excluded. The government is currently considering a higher age limit, which raises the spectre of a social group predominantly between the ages of 16 and 21 being judged by a generation half a century older. But then, some of the volunteers on the tea bar in the lobby are in their 80s, and they manage to relate to the accused. Esther Stewart, 73, used to run a shop on the High Street and recognises the odd shoplifter who stole from her. She could be forgiven for taking a jaundiced view of her customers, but she hasn't a bad word to say of them. "They're actually very well mannered. It's amazing how the young chaps will say, 'keep the change, put it in the tin'. They're always very pleasant. There's never any hassle." In a couthie town like Perth, even the criminals are polite.

Sheriff Michael Fletcher avoids the local bars but has to walk the same streets as his regulars. "They'll wave and say hello, though the last time you saw them they were going down the stairs," he says. Most of his friends are in Dundee, which minimises the risk of socialising with people whose cases he might have to hear. Nevertheless it happens. He's been to parties, only to discover that he's just banned another guest from driving. "The person just said 'the last time I saw you, you were disqualifying me'. 'Oh dear,' said I. You always think people will hold it against you, but mostly people won't. It depends how fair you are."

Crime reflects the community. In the macho west of Scotland the courts are filled with knife-wielding neds. In Perth, the paper reports on folk prosecuted for using words that wouldn't raise an eyebrow on the mean streets of Glasgow. Helen Nisbet, Perth's procurator fiscal, blenches at the suggestion that there is one law for Glasgow and another for Perth. However, she concedes that broadly similar behaviour may or may not end up in court, depending on where it takes place. "If it's an area where swearing is much more common, you're less likely to get the step of someone reporting it to the police."

It's easy to mock small-town values, and no less easy to sentimentalise them, but spend a day in Perth sheriff court and the chances are you'll come away with a sense of social cohesion. For all their differences, the lawyers, reporters, security guards, civil servants, tea ladies and, yes, even the criminals, seem to get along.

Peter Ross is on holiday