‘You should have stopped when they were down,’ Hardy had told him.

To which Jason had shrugged. ‘They started it.’

Even so, the story probably would have ended there had not one of the three ‘victims’ been the son of Richard Raintree, a San Francisco supervisor and political ally of District Attorney Sharron Pratt. Raintree contended that Jason Trent had overreacted to what amounted only to good-natured hazing and was himself drunk on beer. Sharron Pratt agreed – she’d ordered Jason arrested and charged. Now Hardy addressed Judge Li. ’Your honor,‘ he said, ’this is my client’s first alleged offense. He has no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. He holds a steady job. He’s married and has three young children. He shouldn’t even be here in this courtroom. His alleged victims started this fight and he was forced to defend himself.‘

Li allowed a crack in his stern visage, glancing over at the bandaged and splinted victims at the prosecution table. ‘And did a good job of it, didn’t he?’

Hardy kept at it. ‘The point, your honor, is that Mr Trent was pushed to this extreme by three punks who were ganging up on him. For all he knew, they were planning to kill him.’

This woke up the prosecutor, Frank Fischer, who objected to the use of the word punk. ‘And further, your honor, the victims were on the ground at the time of the attack. They posed no threat to Mr Trent at that time.’

‘They are the reason anything happened at all, your honor.’ The odds were that he was whistling in the wind, but Hardy felt he had to go ahead. This was San Francisco in the Nineties.

The ultimate responsibility for any action only rarely got all the way back to a prime mover – there were always too many victims in the path who could claim stress or that their rights had somehow been violated.

The law said that Jason Trent had gone beyond simple self-defense. Trent himself admitted that he’d been driven to loss of control. He wouldn’t pretend he didn’t do it. He’d hurt these slimeballs on purpose because they’d hurt and threatened him first. Whose fault was that? he wanted to know.