Best Of

Great header. It is also what we know in biology as the "rate limiting step".

It speaks to me of how useless Starmer is. He may not know much about other things but has decades of experience of the criminal justice system and should be completely familiar with the delays, yet has failed to tackle it at all.

Or in manufacturing - Queuing Theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory

In project management, it’s called Critical Path Methodology, which will be familiar to anyone who’s done the PMP course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method

Interesting that different disciplines have their own terminology for what’s basically the same idea, that there’s always one point that dictates the speed of the whole process.

And one of the ways to sort the issue is to 'flush' the system on a one-off. So they let x number of prisoners out early to be able to get the system back to a steady state, and everyone complains. Sensible, logical but could/should No.10s comms team actually explain this?

Except the issue isn’t in the prisons it’s in the courts so are you happy to let people charged with crimes XYZ off Scot free because we don’t have time to prosecute them

If you want a civilized society the problem is always everything. Prisons may not be the immediate bottleneck under discussion, but sometimes it is. But the permanent problem of prison is what they are for. Are they there as an expensive way of making bad people worse, or are they there so that the 99.9% of inmates who one day will be let out will then lead lives which don't clog up the courts with criminal cases.

The complex of educational, emotional, psychological and psychiatric problems of the prison population remains mostly unaddressed both during and after incarceration.

A model by which we (pace the Daily Mail) acted on the basis that most crime most of the time has its origin outside bare criminal evilness (though some does) would help.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

Morning All!

Yes, and the judge seemed to throw the (verbal) book at him:
"Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke described Richards' actions as a "flagrant disobedience of the court's directions".'

Surely the discharge of him and his fellow jurors and a lecture on wasting the Court's time would have been sufficient.

A guy gets four months for misunderstanding a jury instruction which results in a delayed trial, whilst all those who defrauded the taxpayer by providing unusable PPE during a national panic, just get to sit and count the accruing interest on their ill gotten gains.

It's a funny old game Saint.

Sounds like he wasn’t even looking up anything about the trial itself, but about the definition of joint enterprise.

How is that worth 4 months in jail?

And how would it be different if said juror simply happened to know about the topic anyway and was discussing such?
It does seem an over the top punishment for a stupid mistake.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

At least 5 days of trial court wasted. Probably at least £100k. Preparation work for a murder probably several multiples of that depending on the complexity of the case. Justice delayed for the best part of a year and more court time needed which delays other cases. For murder, possibly the additional cost of having the accused on remand for even longer.

This is made crystal clear to every jury. What they read on the internet is not necessarily right and it is not evidence in the case. It cannot be allowed to influence their decisions. It sounds relatively innocent but the consequences are significant.

Come on, the sentence is so stiff because the juror has basically trod on the court's toes. Burglary, fraud, people razzing away from the coppers at 70 down a residential road, shoplifters & nonces aren't nearly dealt with as relatively harshly. But because the juror was directly potentially mucking up the judges' own work the sentence is completely out of whack because he's angered the judge.
Now the judge might be very angry with all this but he shouldn't be sentencing based on that anger, which is what I think he's done here.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

Morning All!

Yes, and the judge seemed to throw the (verbal) book at him:
"Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke described Richards' actions as a "flagrant disobedience of the court's directions".'

Surely the discharge of him and his fellow jurors and a lecture on wasting the Court's time would have been sufficient.

A guy gets four months for misunderstanding a jury instruction which results in a delayed trial, whilst all those who defrauded the taxpayer by providing unusable PPE during a national panic, just get to sit and count the accruing interest on their ill gotten gains.

It's a funny old game Saint.

Sounds like he wasn’t even looking up anything about the trial itself, but about the definition of joint enterprise.

How is that worth 4 months in jail?

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

At least 5 days of trial court wasted. Probably at least £100k. Preparation work for a murder probably several multiples of that depending on the complexity of the case. Justice delayed for the best part of a year and more court time needed which delays other cases. For murder, possibly the additional cost of having the accused on remand for even longer.

This is made crystal clear to every jury. What they read on the internet is not necessarily right and it is not evidence in the case. It cannot be allowed to influence their decisions. It sounds relatively innocent but the consequences are significant.

I’m sure all jurors look up things on the internet . To expect jurors to live in a bubble for the whole case is un-realistic. The juror could have been given a non-custodial sentence . There was no malice intended .

The worrying thing is that we are appointing people to juries who are to stupid to understand that if you do a bit of your own research *you shouldn't tell anyone*

The goal, or the gaol?

Yes, the critical constraint should be familiar to anyone who’s run projects or worked in complex production. There’s always one machine or process that determines the throughput of the whole process, and the way you make efficiencies over time is to always concentrate on whatever is the current bottleneck.

The same concept applies to transport, for example you could increase long-distance journey times significantly by tackling a handful of problematic junctions.

When they built the Second Severn Crossing, it should have been blindingly obvious that the Brynglas Tunnels would end up being the bottleneck. That was three decades ago, and the Brynglas Tunnels are still the bottleneck.

There's always a bottleneck - that's how you end up with the "one more lane bro" situation in places like LA. Even if we built HS2, you'd quickly find a new bottleneck somewhere else as the rail travel increases. The same goes for cycle infrastructure - remarkably, we already have serious bottlenecks in central London and even one in Edinburgh.

I understand the frustration they cause but I think there has to be some proper transport engineering and modelling behind resolving them, otherwise you simply move the problem somewhere else.

Yes HS2 would eventually reveal new bottlenecks but x million more people could travel.

a 10-mile viaduct through the middle of a major city is an unfixable problem.

Being pedantic, and returning to PB after a long Trump-victory inspired rest from politics, that’s an unfeasible solution rather than unfixable problem but I take your point.

The 10-mile viaduct is the existing M6, which was the unfixable problem, and why they had to build the M6 toll to add capacity.

Welcome back. Unlike many on here I’m a pragmatist when it comes to Trump, there’s little point getting wound up about someone miles away over whom we have little control. If you follow people who support him as well as those who hate him, then you get a better understanding of where he’s coming from, even if he can be somewhat unpredictable. Certainly a unique politician, that’s for sure.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

Morning All!

Yes, and the judge seemed to throw the (verbal) book at him:
"Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke described Richards' actions as a "flagrant disobedience of the court's directions".'

Surely the discharge of him and his fellow jurors and a lecture on wasting the Court's time would have been sufficient.

A guy gets four months for misunderstanding a jury instruction which results in a delayed trial, whilst all those who defrauded the taxpayer by providing unusable PPE during a national panic, just get to sit and count the accruing interest on their ill gotten gains.

It's a funny old game Saint.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

At least 5 days of trial court wasted. Probably at least £100k. Preparation work for a murder probably several multiples of that depending on the complexity of the case. Justice delayed for the best part of a year and more court time needed which delays other cases. For murder, possibly the additional cost of having the accused on remand for even longer.

This is made crystal clear to every jury. What they read on the internet is not necessarily right and it is not evidence in the case. It cannot be allowed to influence their decisions. It sounds relatively innocent but the consequences are significant.

Agree, but human nature is what it is and SFAICS it is more or less impossible to prevent access to prejudicial etc stuff (including accurate prejudicial stuff like old BBC reports of the earlier crimes of defendant X). So I don't think it can be policed. What it might teach jurors is the same lesson experienced defendants learn: Know how and when to shut up and say nothing.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

At least 5 days of trial court wasted. Probably at least £100k. Preparation work for a murder probably several multiples of that depending on the complexity of the case. Justice delayed for the best part of a year and more court time needed which delays other cases. For murder, possibly the additional cost of having the accused on remand for even longer.

This is made crystal clear to every jury. What they read on the internet is not necessarily right and it is not evidence in the case. It cannot be allowed to influence their decisions. It sounds relatively innocent but the consequences are significant.

I don't think either Mr 67 or myself are disputing that. What we are saying is that the sentence seems both out of proportion to the the offence and, worse, inappropriate.