Jury trials - split the decision
The defeat for the Government in the House of Lords over restricting jury trials was widely expected, but no less damaging to the Home Secretary's plans for legislative reform.
It is unfortunate that in their determination to uphold the right of trial by jury as a bulwark of our liberties, their lordships did not sufficiently distinguish between the two proposals before them. Our system of justice does indeed exist to protect the liberties of the individual, and in all but a handful of cases that come before the crown courts each year, those liberties are best served by jury trial.
The argument that jury trials can be dispensed with in serious fraud cases, if the judge accepts a prosecution plea that the trial has reached a stage where the jury is hopelessly at sea, is unsatisfactory. As we have pointed out in the past, even complex fraud trials boil down to basic distinctions of right and wrong.
It is the task of the judge to explain clearly to a jury the issues at stake, and to demand that the testimony of witnesses be spelled out in simple language.
In a well-run court, defence counsel who set out to confuse the jury get short shrift from the bench. The Home Secretary should recognise this and not attempt to overturn the Lords' decision when the proposal comes before the Commons in September.
The other rejected proposal, to allow the judge to decide whether to dismiss the jury in a trial where there had been serious attempts to nobble it, is a different matter. Scotland Yard claims that the Metropolitan Police spends 26,000 officer days a year protecting juries from intimidation, and yet it cannot protect juries from threatening letters, telephone calls or e-mails.
According to the criminal justice minister, Lady Scotland, "criminal gangs are using everything at their disposal" to sabotage the course of justice, and evidence suggests that when juries have been threatened and received special police protection, they are more likely to convict. In those very exceptional cases where in the course of a trial there is evidence of serious intimidation of a jury, it may well reinforce our civil liberties to have judge-only trials. Not only Britain's police chiefs have made this case but several judges too, among them Lord Justice Auld.
The Government has announced that it intends to use its majority in the House of Commons to force the bill through parliament. This is an opportunity to reassess the bill, and to preserve that part of it which is really worth saving.
