How does dickens gain sympathy for the people who are on trial?

We can say that Dickens is a master of characterization and his characters are deeply human and deeply flawed but yet they all have something we can relate too. Besides that during the trial we can see that the people there have it rough, the odds are heavily against them, and the trial could already be seen as decided before it even began. The people there don't know what the readers know about these characters and as Pip began to see there is more to them than their crimes.

  i think colonial period |-/