She has often defended the apparently indefensible. As a hardened criminal hack, Sally O’Neill, QC, has acted for baby batterers, child abusers and murderers. And she preempts the stock question people ask of barristers about defending someone who they think is guilty. “It can be very difficult. You try to remain objective and impartial, to distance yourself and not form a view – which would be unhelpful.”

But, she insists, that is key to doing a professional job – as when she defended Roy Whiting, the murderer of seven-year-old Sarah Payne. In the same way, the new chairman of the Criminal Bar Association argues that whatever people think of the violence by young people on the streets, such offenders – often no more than children – deserve a better deal at the hands of the criminal justice system. “It doesn’t matter how much you disapprove of the offence. These people are often very vulnerable.”

This is O’Neill’s personal message for the coming 12 months as she takes over this week as head of the 4,000 prosecution and defence barristers in England and Wales. Young people, she believes, should often not be put in the criminal courts as traditionally run. “The use of a Crown Court like the Old Bailey, where I often work, to try defendants as young as 10 seems to be both inappropriate and outmoded. We need a completely fresh look at the whole way we try young people... whether in an informal forum, albeit still with a jury, perhaps a panel of specially trained youth justices. But not the whole panoply of the Crown Court.

“It troubles me that we do too little too late. We do try to help them within the trial process but it must start with the arrest – it’s not sufficient to have an ‘appropriate’ adult with them; you need to treat them differently, such as with the interviewing techniques, the questions they are being asked – special treatment from the start. I don’t think we are providing justice for them as we do for other vulnerable people, whether witnesses or defendants. It needs to be looked at from scratch.”

O’Neill is mindful that such comments could be unpopular when increasing incidents of violent lawlessness seem to involve youngsters. She cites the recent case in which a group threw stones at a man in a park and he died of a heart attack; and is aware that public sympathies are not with the offenders. But she says: “You can still properly and seriously – and severely if necessary – deal with these people but you must do so in the right environment with the right safeguards. It doesn’t seem right, seeing them wandering around the court complex.”

O’Neill is one of five children who grew up at a stately home in Staffordshire, Blithfield Hall, because her father, on retiring from the Army, took on the job of running it. “It was a wonderful childhood,” she says. “We lived in the hall and had access not just to that but to a very large garden and the estate... we were very privileged from that point of view.”

But her father died suddenly aged 59 at the time of her A levels and she failed to land a place to read medicine. Instead, her mother thought that she should try for law, so she did an external LLb at Essex Technical College, Chelmsford – now one of the new universities. She and her husband David of 21 years (they have no children but two English bulldogs) divide their time between a house in Islington and one near Woodbridge, Suffolk, where her late mother used to live.

She likes sailing, skiing and gardening and has a penchant for silk scarves – all the press pictures of her at the time of the Whiting trial showed her in one of the two Christian Lacroix scarves given to her by her husband. That trial gave her a taste of being in the media spotlight that could serve her well in the next year.

The new chairman both prosecutes and defends (from Furnival Chambers) and sits as a recorder. From that perspective she laments the lack of discretion for judges in sentencing – “the tick-box approach” – and is highly critical of the new indeterminate sentences for public protection that mean that large numbers of offenders are locked up, many for some relatively minor offences for “what is effectively a ‘life sentence’ because of the lack of facilities in prison to enable the offenders to show that they are fit for release”.

This year, too, she will act as the spokesperson and figurehead for criminal advocates – at a time when their rates of pay have been squeezed and legal aid work is more unprofitable and, she says, undervalued, than ever before. One problem, is the Bar’s inability to get over its message on this front – “which is ironic, given what we do for a living”, she says. “But we don’t seem able to get over the message that the Criminal Bar provides a necessary and useful function for the public. We have a very good criminal justice system in this country and it’s important to maintain that at this high standard. The public deserves the best quality advocates: should anyone end up in the criminal justice system, they will want the best.”

The danger, she says, is that quality was in danger of being sidelined to cut costs. “The best people will drift away, either from the Bar or from publicly funded work because they can’t afford to do the work. People think barristers already earn too much but they will drift away, which will be a great, great loss; and it is because of the undervaluing of this work and not just financially.”

She is determined that people should continue to be provided with the best quality of advocate possible. “But the danger of this continual chipping away, with being undervalued, is that the really good people will go. It is a very real risk.”

Key facts
Age: 53; School: St Joseph’s Covent School, Stafford; Alleynes Grammar School, Uttoxeter; Essex Technical College. Called to the Bar, 1976; Crown Court recorder. Likes sailing, scarves and dogs.

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