Lawyer breaks down Jamie’s legal defense in Adolescence and predicts his possible sentence

A criminal defence lawyer has detailed what Jamie’s defence in court could have been after he pled guilty to the murder of schoolgirl Katie in Netflix’s Adolescence.

Jamie’s story in Netflix’s top show is left on a massive cliffhanger, and no, that wasn’t to tease a possible season two. Instead, Jamie was omitted from episode four to give proper attention to his family.

“I wanted to eliminate the possibility of thinking Eddie is a violent man,” Stephen Graham told Tudum earlier. “Eddie is a hardworking father who goes to work early in the morning, comes back late at night, and puts food on the table. He brings in as much love as he can. He does the best he can.”

Though Jamie is a central character, he’s a name and face for the real antagonist of the show, the misogynistic content he’s viewing online. We as viewers don’t need to know what happened to Jamie because his story is but one of many, but still, I can’t help but wonder about the legal process afterwards.

What would Jamie’s defence be in Adolescence?

The last we really see of Jamie is in episode three when he sits down with Erin Doherty’s psychologist character Briony Briony Ariston. He doesn’t feature in episode four, for a very good reason, and we are left to wonder about Jamie’s life post guilty plea.

Speaking to the MailOnline, criminal defence solicitor Liam Kotrie explained how he would try to “protect” Jamie “at all costs” by telling him to answer “no comment” in episode one’s police interview. Unfortunately, the CCTV that was unearthed would be a huge torpedo in any legal defence.

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“He would have been banged to rights. It was incredibly damning,” Liam said. “I would [then] be thinking about mental health and seeing both a psychiatrist and psychologist to see how he ended up in this situation. Is there an opening for a manslaughter plea? There’s a good chance he was looking at an offence of murder.”

While the CCTV is undoubtedly destructive to any legal defence, Liam explained how it’s never that cut and dry.

“It’s often the case where you see CCTV and it looks very damning but then you see texts or accounts from other people, and it paints a wider picture. It’s not quite as straight cut,” he added. “I would be looking to see if he has been a victim of some kind of bullying. But frankly, when it comes to murder, that mitigation doesn’t go so far.”

How long would Jamie have been jailed for?

In real life, Jamie’s identity would have been kept private due to his age and Section 39 of the Children and Young Persons Act of 1939. His case would then have been tried in a crown court, with formalities such as wearing wigs relaxed due to the nature of the crime.

“He would have been given a sentence of detention. In a case like this, taking into account his age, it would have been about 10 to 15 years,” the lawyer said.

He theorised that Adolescence’s Jamie would have received a minimum of 12 years, but I honestly thought it would have been more.

Adolescence is on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Featured image credit: Netflix