In one form or another, trial by
jury has been with us for the best part of eight hundred years. The principle that a man charged with high
crimes and misdemeanours should be tried by a jury of his peers is the bulwark
of a civilized society, or so they say.
The statistics are interesting,
if statistics can ever be interesting. With
the obvious exception of libel, trial by jury is now confined to crime. However, only 12% of all crimes are now tried
by jury in the crown court, as most criminal cases are tried by District Judges
or a panel of magistrates.
Of those
cases finding their way to the crown court, the vast majority settle, or the
police lose the file, or the Crown Prosecution Service make a horlicks of it
and jack it in at the first opportunity.
The composition of the jury has
changed markedly since twelve honest men and true. First we had women, then the age
qualification was dropped from twenty one down to eighteen, and now any Tom,
Dick or Harry is eligible for jury service, including lawyers and judges!
We have also witnessed the dumbing down of
the legal system, with happy morons sitting side by side with the more
intellectually gifted, and all having an equal say. Time was when the happy morons would defer to
their elders and betters, but no more. As Dirty Harry once memorably quipped: “Opinions are like assholes,
everybody’s got one.”
I used to be a vocal proponent of
trial by jury, but recent startling acquittals have led me to question its
merits as a fair way of reaching the truth. The acquittal of the monosyllabic Steven Gerrard is a case in point. You may remember the case. Gerrard was charged with affray, and tried
and acquitted by a jury of his peers at Liverpool Crown Court, and this in the
teeth of CCTV evidence.
Bearing in mind
that Gerrard is an iconic footballer playing for Liverpool Football Club,
whatever possessed the CPS to allow the trial to take place within a stone’s
throw of Anfield? Far better to have moved
the trial to Manchester,
where, after a fair trial, he would have been convicted, and would now be
playing football in the prison exercise yard.
The criminal system allows the
judge to direct the jury to acquit at any stage of the trial, but does not
allow him to direct the jury to convict, so even where the accused has no
defence whatsoever to the charge, the judge is powerless to intervene. It should also be remembered that the concept
of fairness, much vaunted in trial by jury, implies fairness to both the
prosecution and the defence.
So I wonder
out loud what the victim of Gerrard’s aggressive behaviour thought of his
acquittal? These perverse verdicts cause
considerable problems for the police in gathering evidence, interviewing
witnesses, getting them to court, and putting them through the ordeal of giving
evidence. It’s little wonder that
witnesses to crime are so reluctant to come forward.
Times have changed since Lord
Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice and the trial judge, single handedly engineered
the conviction and execution of Derek Bentley back in the early fifties. Judges are now more user friendly, and in my
opinion, the chances of an acquittal before a judge are just as high as they
are with a jury. But more important,
judges understand the complexities of the law in a way that is totally alien to
the average juror, and are better placed to apply the law to the facts. This results in a fair hearing and a proper
verdict.
Sadly, I must revisit my support
for trial by jury, which is now an anachronism. It served a purpose, but no longer, and by persevering with it, we risk
making a laughing stock out of the criminal law.
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