Best Of

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

There is no way 2 would work - most people will just fast forward the video or put it on and do something else

Have all the jury prep etc run by court staff. The day before.

Have jury prep as a courthouse function, run by staff. As a continual operation. Lining up juries, get them sorted, warned, lanyarded.

So 9am, the judge, lawyers, etc all roll in together.

Judge can have the option to say - “I don’t look this jury, do you have a similar one? But in a shade of mauve?”

You're right, of course you're right, but you know the objections.

Spending a bit more to get a lot more is still spending more, and we've conditioned ourselves to not want that.

It's moving spending from frontline staff to backstage. And we've massively conditioned ourselves to not want that.

Yet again on pb the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials comes from the very same people who want to massively cut public spending and reduce public sector pay and benefits dramatically.

The concept of we only get what we are willing to pay for seems to have completely passed them by.

What utter twaddle. I have been consistent in my opposition to this proposal and have suggested both above and BTL ways to raise money.

The justice system is the first and most fundamental duty of the state. This is not about saving money or not having the money to spend. It is a power grab by an illiberal and authoritarian minded bunch of third rate politicians with little understanding of or appreciation for our history, our freedoms and the fundamentals of a truly liberal democracy.

I am certainly not supporting Lammy's move, although I suspect he is not aiming at that as an end goal either but using this position to shift the Overton window in order get the Leveson proposals through.

If we want to successfully reform our justice system from here, then we have to spend significant amounts of money. We have to be willing to pay more in tax.

The total budget for the Ministry of Justice is ~£12bn, but the majority of that is on prisons, rather than the court system itself. You could fix the issues in the court system, without doing away with jury trials, for a sum of money that is less than a rounding error in the budget as a whole.

I am generally supportive of paying more tax, and I agree that the roots of the present crisis lie in the money saved from the Justice budget in the Coalition years, but I don't think your argument is on good ground here.

Within justice there is no point fixing the courts without fixing the prisons, we would just need to release more people earlier as we convicted them more speedily!

If everything else in the country worked fine, then sure you could fix one small part of govt spending without significant tax rises. But the same situation applies throughout much of the public sector, water, transport, education - crumbling out of date infrastructure, lack of motivated permanent staff, poor or negligible use of technology, with process taking priority over outcomes and common sense.

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

There is no way 2 would work - most people will just fast forward the video or put it on and do something else

Have all the jury prep etc run by court staff. The day before.

Have jury prep as a courthouse function, run by staff. As a continual operation. Lining up juries, get them sorted, warned, lanyarded.

So 9am, the judge, lawyers, etc all roll in together.

Judge can have the option to say - “I don’t look this jury, do you have a similar one? But in a shade of mauve?”

You're right, of course you're right, but you know the objections.

Spending a bit more to get a lot more is still spending more, and we've conditioned ourselves to not want that.

It's moving spending from frontline staff to backstage. And we've massively conditioned ourselves to not want that.

Yet again on pb the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials comes from the very same people who want to massively cut public spending and reduce public sector pay and benefits dramatically.

The concept of we only get what we are willing to pay for seems to have completely passed them by.

I have no idea if this is true, but it is rational for opinions to come in related sets, and opinions which don't arise in related ways lack an underlying coherence. Rather than turning the point into a meaningless (and maybe unverified) piece of ad hominem, it would be more useful to examine the relation of the set of opinions, and consider its worth.

What is irrational about wanting to have a much smaller state while keeping the jury system? We had juries when we had a much smaller state. (I am not proposing either, personally, but there is nothing counter intuitive about it.)

The frustration is the party led by this group of people have been in power most of my lifetime, and to be fair match the views of the electorate in not wanting to increase taxes.

So we have court rooms out of use because of leaks, because we don't want to spend money.
We have a lack of lawyers and judges, because we don't want to spend money.
Our prisons can't cope, because we don't want to spend money.
Prisoners come out early, without any thought of rehabilitation and commit more crime.

Whilst I would prefer jury trials and functioning prisons myself, it does grate to hear the attacks on the status quo from the supporters of the establishment party with zero consideration of how we get here, or any serious thought on how we can change course and what resources that requires.

Except for a very short time under Mrs T, public expenditure has risen throughout the last decades. The state in various forms manages 44% of total expenditure, over £40,000 per household, just a little short of the highest in Europe and in the middle of the developed pack. Despite that there is not a single area not crying out for much more spending. Something is wrong with the model, but it isn't that taxes are very significantly too low.

That is not "just a little short of the highest in Europe". It's 57% in France, with other European countries above 44% including Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Slovenia/-akia.

Noted. It's still a lot of money and a big % of GDP. I'll look a bit more when I have time.

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

There is no way 2 would work - most people will just fast forward the video or put it on and do something else

Have all the jury prep etc run by court staff. The day before.

Have jury prep as a courthouse function, run by staff. As a continual operation. Lining up juries, get them sorted, warned, lanyarded.

So 9am, the judge, lawyers, etc all roll in together.

Judge can have the option to say - “I don’t look this jury, do you have a similar one? But in a shade of mauve?”

You're right, of course you're right, but you know the objections.

Spending a bit more to get a lot more is still spending more, and we've conditioned ourselves to not want that.

It's moving spending from frontline staff to backstage. And we've massively conditioned ourselves to not want that.

Yet again on pb the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials comes from the very same people who want to massively cut public spending and reduce public sector pay and benefits dramatically.

The concept of we only get what we are willing to pay for seems to have completely passed them by.

I thought the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials came from the people who were most horrified by the Colston statue decision.

I was surprised by the wild support for Jury trials. At least a judge knows the law and hopefully has no axes to grind. Whereas a jury by the law of averages will have at least 4 Faragists amonst them. Who could want those bigots sitting in judgement on you?

Not a believer in the wisdom of crowds then

…

Re Juries

I missed the PB discussion on this, if there was one, which I regret because it is an important topic and interests me. I had two spells of jury service and sat on four trials. Three were trivial and could have been much better dealt with by a small tribunal, or jury of much less than twelve. The fourth concerned the handling of £51,000 in counterfeit £20 notes and merited a jury trial.

One lesson I learned is that if you want to get off, you want to have a stupid jury. One I was on was exceptionally dim and preoccupied with getting home as quickly as possible. The counterfeit handler had the misfortune to have a number of very smart people on the jury, a couple of whom were able to pick up the barristers on some small errors in documents and evidence. He went down, and rightly so, I am sure.

My overall impression is that the whole system is extremely wasteful and inefficient and a lot of cases simply do not merit the attention they currently receive. The problem is where to draw the line between the serious and the trivial. I'm not sure where it should be drawn, but I think the current system is far too wasteful of resources.

By the way it may surprise my fellow pbers to learn that I appeared in court on a charge about eighteen months ago. My solicitor asked if I wanted a jury or magistrates trial. She reckoned I was almost certain to get off if I had a jury. She also thought I would be ok with magistrates but couldn't guarantee it because they can be a bit quirky. I nevertheless opted for magistrates because I regarded the whole thing as too trivial to warrant a jury and she agreed.

Naturally I got off. It made me think better of magistrates in general and that they could be used more to deal with the horrible backlog in the court system.

We have a weird system largely due to the mix of English and French laws and customs.

In the Royal Court (equiv of Crown Court in UK) you only get a Jury for “serious” “Customary” offences like murder and Rape and you need a minimum of ten jurors out of 12 for a conviction.

Otherwise we have non jury trials, which aren’t magistrates court level, where the senior legal judges - Bailiff, Deputy Bailiff and Royal Commissioners sit alongside a minimum of two Jurats (lay persons who have had distinguished careers elected by a Commission of politicians and lawyers) for cases where punishment up to 4 years prison and minimum of 5 Jurats for more serious cases.

As a system it seems to work well however I’m not sure it could work in UK as the need for so many Judges/Jurats for each case to replace juries would be too onerous. The upside is that the decision of the court doesn’t rest with one judge.

Flicking through the last thread I noticed a few of the Reform Lite posters criticising Rachel for being photographed with a chess board on her desk and one of them suggested she was trying to make herself look clever. She was infact underr 14 chess champion.

I think there's a lot of misogyny when it comes to Rachel. Would people be so patronising if it was Gove for example?

Gove is another misfit who got plenty of personal flak. It's the game.

I don't really get the chess thing, she was clearly very good, probably top 1% of all players, but not elite. To get to that level demonstrates a decent level of logic, planning and reasoning skills. To get to elite, does the same, but also requires a level of obsession that is probably unhealthy for a national leader.

A bit of internet digging suggests that she did little chess other than schoolgirl competitions. She doesn’t have a public ELO (chess ranking).

Now if she could say she was 2,000 ELO, close to a Master ranking, then she might be taken seriously in the chess world.

Huh? Why is this relevant? She’s proud of what she’s done and rightly so. If a politician rugby player had some end of season award he won from the Old Rubberduckians RFC on his desk it wouldn’t even be mentioned. Certainly no one would go carp about “lack of representative honours”

When you’re making it the centerpiece of your pre-budget photo, one is entitled to investigate.

If it was just mention en passant that would be one thing but this persistent discovered attack from the opposition just feels a bit desperado to me.

Perhaps she plays with somebody from Prague? That would be her Czech mate...

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

There is no way 2 would work - most people will just fast forward the video or put it on and do something else

Have all the jury prep etc run by court staff. The day before.

Have jury prep as a courthouse function, run by staff. As a continual operation. Lining up juries, get them sorted, warned, lanyarded.

So 9am, the judge, lawyers, etc all roll in together.

Judge can have the option to say - “I don’t look this jury, do you have a similar one? But in a shade of mauve?”

You're right, of course you're right, but you know the objections.

Spending a bit more to get a lot more is still spending more, and we've conditioned ourselves to not want that.

It's moving spending from frontline staff to backstage. And we've massively conditioned ourselves to not want that.

Yet again on pb the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials comes from the very same people who want to massively cut public spending and reduce public sector pay and benefits dramatically.

The concept of we only get what we are willing to pay for seems to have completely passed them by.

I have no idea if this is true, but it is rational for opinions to come in related sets, and opinions which don't arise in related ways lack an underlying coherence. Rather than turning the point into a meaningless (and maybe unverified) piece of ad hominem, it would be more useful to examine the relation of the set of opinions, and consider its worth.

What is irrational about wanting to have a much smaller state while keeping the jury system? We had juries when we had a much smaller state. (I am not proposing either, personally, but there is nothing counter intuitive about it.)

The frustration is the party led by this group of people have been in power most of my lifetime, and to be fair match the views of the electorate in not wanting to increase taxes.

So we have court rooms out of use because of leaks, because we don't want to spend money.
We have a lack of lawyers and judges, because we don't want to spend money.
Our prisons can't cope, because we don't want to spend money.
Prisoners come out early, without any thought of rehabilitation and commit more crime.

Whilst I would prefer jury trials and functioning prisons myself, it does grate to hear the attacks on the status quo from the supporters of the establishment party with zero consideration of how we get here, or any serious thought on how we can change course and what resources that requires.

Except for a very short time under Mrs T, public expenditure has risen throughout the last decades. The state in various forms manages 44% of total expenditure, over £40,000 per household, just a little short of the highest in Europe and in the middle of the developed pack. Despite that there is not a single area not crying out for much more spending. Something is wrong with the model, but it isn't that taxes are very significantly too low.

We have no money

Yet we are spending £700 million on saving a handful of salmon. Billions on an armoured vehicle that literally makes the occupants chronically ill. We can’t find GPs, while we train GPs who can’t get jobs. We have no money to look after children with special needs, but councils are block booking taxis to send them to school - as opposed to a school bus.

It’s feast-or-famine mode spending. Often on insane things.

Re Juries

I missed the PB discussion on this, if there was one, which I regret because it is an important topic and interests me. I had two spells of jury service and sat on four trials. Three were trivial and could have been much better dealt with by a small tribunal, or jury of much less than twelve. The fourth concerned the handling of £51,000 in counterfeit £20 notes and merited a jury trial.

One lesson I learned is that if you want to get off, you want to have a stupid jury. One I was on was exceptionally dim and preoccupied with getting home as quickly as possible. The counterfeit handler had the misfortune to have a number of very smart people on the jury, a couple of whom were able to pick up the barristers on some small errors in documents and evidence. He went down, and rightly so, I am sure.

My overall impression is that the whole system is extremely wasteful and inefficient and a lot of cases simply do not merit the attention they currently receive. The problem is where to draw the line between the serious and the trivial. I'm not sure where it should be drawn, but I think the current system is far too wasteful of resources.

By the way it may surprise my fellow pbers to learn that I appeared in court on a charge about eighteen months ago. My solicitor asked if I wanted a jury or magistrates trial. She reckoned I was almost certain to get off if I had a jury. She also thought I would be ok with magistrates but couldn't guarantee it because they can be a bit quirky. I nevertheless opted for magistrates because I regarded the whole thing as too trivial to warrant a jury and she agreed.

Naturally I got off. It made me think better of magistrates in general and that they could be used more to deal with the horrible backlog in the court system.

And if a magistrate or judge has a bias, there's no check on it at all without ordinary members of the public. Removal of juries could be a first step towards having magistrates or judges appointed/elected and being overtly political. Juries are not perfect but they are important.

Thanks Morris.

If there was any bias shown by the magistrate in my case it was against the prosecution.

As for juries, I am reminded of Bismarck's comment regarding the making of laws and sausages. If you like them, best not to observe how they are made. When you have been on a few juries you wonder how so many come up with plausible decisions. Of the four I was on I should say one definitely gave a wrong verdict, two probably got it right, and one unquestionably got it right. As mentioned above, three were trivial cases, and could in my opinion have easily been handled by a simpler and easier process.