Seen it all, bar none
HOBART barrister Steven Chopping will hang up his Bar jacket for the last time at the end of the month — if it doesn’t fall apart first.
After 46½ years practising law in Hobart, Mr Chopping, 69, is on to his third Bar jacket, which he says has almost worn out, and the velcro on his court bib won’t last much longer.
The bow tie-wearing lawyer started at law firm Simmons Wolfhagen in January 1970 and was admitted to the Bar on February 1, 1972.
“A week after I got admitted I started a criminal trial for a bloke I’d been at school with and I thought that his story wasn’t very likely but the jury found him not guilty,” Mr Chopping said.
“I think I was the second most surprised person in the court perhaps after him.”
Growing up in an orchardist family at Woodbridge, where he went to the local two-room school, the young Mr Chopping developed an early interest in the law.
“All I ever wanted to do was appear in court, right from when I was about 12,” he said.
“I never really wanted to do anything else and I’m lucky that that’s the one thing I wanted to do and it’s the one thing I’ve done.”
He said his initial interest stemmed from a desire for fairness.
“It doesn’t matter how bad someone is, most people have got good in them and it’s to emphasise the good side of somebody, or to test the nature of the evidence against them.
“People say [to defence lawyers], ‘ How can you look after these guilty people?’ but nobody ever says to a prosecutor, ‘How can you prosecute those innocent people’?
“There are lots of people found not guilty.”
He describes defence as “a bit like playing cards or Scrabble; you make the best you can with it for them in court against the other side”.
Mr Chopping decided to re- tire when he realised he had fallen out of love with the job.
“It became more work than it had before,” he said.
“I think things are different: lawyers are different, the clients are different, the law’s different, the whole community attitude is different from what it used to be. There’s a huge amount of drugs, domestic violence, violence in the street, and the attitude of the offenders seems to be that nobody wants to take responsibility for their actions; it’s always someone else’s fault.
“Maybe that was the same before and I overlooked it, but I think that it’s more so these days.”
Mr Chopping said there were also more child pornography cases these days.
“Some of those images really bring tears to your eyes,” he said. “They’re the harder ones.” One of Mr Chopping’s last cases was his first perjury case and joins a varied list of charges he has defended during his career. “I’ve done bigamy — there are not too many of those around — I’ve done perjury … piracy and treason are about the only things I haven’t done,” he said.
Mr Chopping started wearing his trademark bow tie in the mid-1970s, and now has a collection of more than 100, his wife tells him.
“Sometimes you have to be a bit different,” he said of his penchant for a bow tie.
Retirement will give Mr Chopping more time to spend on his other passions.
He has been volunteering as a motorsport official for many years and last year received an AM for his services to the sport.
He will travel to Singapore, Japan, China and Abu Dhabi before the end of the year for five motorsport events he is involved in.
Mr Chopping is also a keen sailor, and with three sons and four grandchildren, he does not expect to have much spare time.
Looking back on his career, there’s not much Mr Chopping says he would change, and he said juries “almost always” get it right.
“There’ve been some disappointments. There were some cases that I hoped might have gone differently, but only four or five,” he said.
“It’s always good to win and get a not-guilty verdict but it’s also good to get a reduced or a low-ish penalty on matters where people were guilty or pleaded guilty
“In lots of cases there have been people who have learnt their lesson, progressed and you never see them again.”
It doesn’t matter how bad someone is, most people have got good in them Retiring barrister STEVEN CHOPPING