Should the jury system be scrapped?

November 6, 2008

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Web 2.0 may have been a boon for Barack Obama, but here in the UK our Lord Chief Justice doesn’t seem so sure of its merits.

As Frances Gibb reports in today’s Times, the excellently-named Lord Judge told an audience at a University of Hertfordshire lecture that the internet generation may lack the requisite ‘listening skills’ for jury service. The problem, it seems, is that modern society is conditioning people to acquire information in bite-sized chunks via the internet. Such people are undoubtedly “technically proficient” but Lord Judge wonders “whether, learning as they do in this way, they will be accustomed, as we were, to listening for prolonged periods.”

“I cannot begin to imagine the extent of the changes which lie ahead,” said the Lord Chief Justice, hypothesising that by 2020 some jurors would be asking for the information on which they have to make their decision to be provided in rather more whizzy, gadgety fashion than something so prosaic as listening to the advocates in court and the judge’s summing up.

At the same time, however, Lord Judge also warned of the dangers of the internet in criminal trials. Nowadays, judges routinely give directions to jurors telling them not to research the facts before them on the internet, but “inevitably from time to time an individual juror will disregard the direction and make his own private inquiries.” In some cases this has led to the quashing of convictions or the abandonement of trials.

Blade has some sympathy with Lord Judge’s disquiet, but fears that it is less the brave new Web 2.0 world that is the problem, and more the jury system per se.  In Blade’s experience, jurors are more likely to be prejudiced, racist, bored and asleep than pay attention to the evidence before them. What’s worse is the law which says that enquiring about, and publishing, the machinations of the jury room is a contempt of court.

Every lawyer in the UK will have a tale or ten of ineptitude, verging on scandalous contempt for justice, among jurors. Scrapping the antiquated belief that 12 good men and true serve the interests of justice might just be a better solution than, Canute-like, attempting to mould this area of the legal process to the modern world.

 

One Response to “Should the jury system be scrapped?”

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
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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.