If you’re beginning to doubt the importance of jury trials, please consider the possibility that you’re being led into error by a government that is pathologically resistant to justice and accountability.

Since David Lammy announced the latest step in dismantling our (formerly world-class) justice system, I’ve seen two arguments against jury trials being passed around social media. Knowing how the world works, we should be asking where those ideas came from. They are:

It’s expensive and time consuming and is creating a backlog of cases – justice delayed is justice denied.

A clever argument, because it’s broadly true – but we need to ask, why has it, like our NHS, our libraries and so many other things, become expensive and impractical now? They used to work, didn’t they? What happened? Decades of irresponsible government cuts is what happened. Once upon a time our justice system, like so many other services, was managed and backed up by a fully staffed civil service, with securely employed, properly trained staff and all the resources they could wish for. And just like our immigration system, when it runs without proper staffing and resources, it creates backlogs, and backlogs create problems.

That’s not a fault inherent in jury service, it’s a fault inherent in decades of bad government.

Why should some random bloke off the street be fairer of mind than a professional judge?

There is no reason whatever why that random bloke should but this is the wrong question. What we need is a judge and not one, but 12 randomly chosen citizens. Sure, your seriously unfair bloke might be one of the 12 but, as anyone who’s had anything to do with people’s assemblies will probably have discovered, when a circle of people sit down to pay attention and discuss something together, they tend to smooth out each other’s oddities, and there’s a good chance at least one of them will spot an important angle that perhaps the majority wouldn’t.

Juries are, like democracy, not perfect but they’re the best idea we’ve come up with so far and – particularly pertinent in this time of bad government, an excellent insurance against biased judges and bad faith lawyers.

There is though, a far, far more important factor to consider at this time. Why do governments get into a place where they want to close down protest, or where they daren’t trust a bunch of random citizens to judge cases? If we stand outside our long-held habit of thinking we live in one of the sensible countries, if we think about those things the way we think about authoritarian governments in other countries, we should be turning hard back on David Lammy and saying why don’t you want people to speak their minds about Palestine, why are you afraid of letting random citizens judge cases?

Please consider reading about the campaign group Defend our Juries, and supporting their work.

Click here to read about Defend our Juries

 ********************

Dear Reader,

Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.

You can make one-off or monthly payments by BACS to Mrs K Green, Sort: 07 01 16, Acct No: 43287058, Reference: blog

Or via Paypal…

Click here to donate via Paypal

Another great way to support this, and other independent blogs you read, is liking and sharing on social media, signing up for email updates, or by emailing a link to friends.

Cheers,

Kay

********************