Thomas Sutcliffe: I was merely resting my eyes, your honour

What I would like to know is how the defence counsel argued that Judge Hutton had nodded off. Did the noble head pitch forward and hit the bench with a resounding thump? Or was it one those stately alternations of droop and jerk – forehead slowly ratcheting downwards until some hind-brain system suddenly kicks in to restore some equilibrium?

Were the junior lawyers taking bets on the exact moment that the light of justice would flicker out? And, if he had been challenged on his exact state of alertness, would the Judge have resorted to that instinctive refuge of the detected dozer – "Carry on Mr Austin – I was merely resting my eyes."

Naturally the Lord Chancellor is treating this matter with the gravity it deserves. It's one thing to spend £59,000 of taxpayers' money on neo-gothic wallpaper, quite another to sacrifice £50,000 (the estimated cost of the rape trial that was abandoned on Monday at Gloucester Crown Court) to an attack of the predatory cat-naps. And, at one level anyway, anything other than gravity would be scandalous. What might you feel if you were the accused or the alleged victim in this case – consigned to a Groundhog Day reprise of your ordeal?

Dozing can even be fatal – as the Selby train crash demonstrated. Most of us are lucky enough to come to after our motorway fugues – suddenly horribly aware that the inner reptile has been at the wheel for the last five miles and didn't think it was necessary to trouble the higher consciousness – and it's a luck we should never rely on.

Judge Hutton said he was not aware that he had dropped off, but agreed to discharge the jury if it appeared as if he had. I hope Lord Irvine of Lairg at least treats this as a mitigating factor. And I hope he remembers some of those long afternoons he's spent on the Woolsack in the House of Lords – the lights beaming down a soothing warmth, 20lb of horsehair constricting the cerebral circulation. Perhaps the Lord Chancellor never actually drifted off – but I'd bet good money that the anchor started to drag from time to time.

The problem is that vigilance is itself soporific. Theatre critics know this well – that the awareness that nothing must be missed tends to release a powerful tranquilliser into the bloodstream and the more you think "mustn't drop off, mustn't drop off", the higher the dose gets.

There was a generation of critics who didn't worry too much about such things – for them the definition of professional behaviour was being able to fall asleep without actually snoring. Indeed, it was said of one well-known critic that marquee puffs on the lines of "a stimulating evening in the theatre" were merely evidence that he'd managed to stay awake from beginning to end.

Politicians too are liable to fall into a pothole of slumber at the most inopportune moments – I seem to remember a cherishable bit of news footage which showed Mrs Thatcher, those hooded eyelids fluttering as President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's oratory lowered a candle-snuffer over the dying flame of her consciousness.

The fact that the words "cherishable" and "Mrs Thatcher" occur in the same sentence testifies to the odd humanising force of sleep. Because the problem with Judge Hutton's brief dip into oblivion is not just that he might have missed some vital forensic detail, but that authority ebbed from him as his head dropped. Nobody can be impressive when they're asleep – or when, as Leigh Hunt put it, "gentle failure of perceptions" begins to take effect.

This too could be offered as a kind of mitigation – though it might take an audacious brief to do it. If Lord Irvine wants to bring the judiciary closer to the people they serve Judge Hutton's involuntary demonstration of his human vulnerability surely helped bridge the gap.

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk