Criminal Trial by Judge Alone: Are You Serious?

June 19, 2009

old-bailey

A sensible move to see justice done or a sad day for the British legal system? Either way, the excellently named Lord Judge’s decision that four men accused of a bungled multi-million pound armed robbery be tried without a jury has led to some seriously negative PR for British justice. Take a look at the comments on this story by Frances Gibb in the Times.

The men, who allegedly took part in a £1.75 million raid at Heathrow, face the first criminal trial without a jury in England and Wales for 400 years. Sitting in the Court of Appeal, Lord Judge, with the similarly well named Lord Justice Goldring and the rather more prosaically entitled Mr Justice McCombe, decided that the case should be heard by judge alone after claims of jury nobbling in an earlier trial.

Many is the time Swordplay’s denizens have seen jurors fall asleep during evidence, or simply fail to understand what is going on around them. If only the same were not true of judges, we might not feel such disquiet at the Court of Appeal’s decision. But aside from that, isn’t the very fallibility of the jury a component of our cherished right to be judged by our peers? We may have our doubts about the jury system, but we find them eclipsed by this decision.

Image of the Old Bailey courtesy of Simon Crubellier.

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.