Simon Jenkins implies that removing juries will give us the benefits of European inquisitorial judicial systems or the enlightened Scandinavian approach to justice (David Lammy is right to slash the use of juries – it’s an open-and-shut case, 28 November).
Neither the Leveson report nor David Lammy’s memo suggest anything of the kind. They seek to retain the adversarial system and simply remove the democratic element that is its best safeguard in serious cases.
The deep concern that criminal lawyers and defendants express at this worst-of-both-worlds is not special pleading. It is the insight of the people caught up in a system that most of the public understandably do not consider closely until they are unlucky enough to be charged with a crime, or otherwise see from the relatively comfortable perspective of a juror or journalist.
Tellingly, Mr Jenkins seems to describe having been on juries who returned not-guilty verdicts because they could see it was obvious that a criminal conviction was a grossly disproportionate consequence of what they had been asked to assess. He should consider whether a case-hardened professional judge on their umpteenth grievous bodily harm case would retain the same sense of proportion in analysing the same facts.
We know that jurors bring a humane, rounded perspective to the system that trained professionals who spend their life in court cannot. Mr Jenkins and his fellow jurors seem to have done exactly that, even if his patience was tested by the delays involved in getting things right.
Simeon Wallis
Barrister, 2BR chambers
• My experience of sitting as a part-time judge in the criminal courts is that juries work well. Jurors take the job very seriously and tend to come to the right conclusion (except in fraud cases). It brings citizens who are complete strangers together to decide something serious. If only we had more opportunities for citizens to come together in people’s assemblies to contribute to government policy decision-making.
The terrible court backlogs and numbers detained without trial are the result of massive underfunding, not juries. Simon Jenkins mistakenly blames juries for the numbers in prison. Juries only decide guilt – sentencing is exclusively the judge’s job. And Jenkins’s idea that barristers like juries because they want an audience shows that he has watched too much television. Barristers want to be paid, not to have an audience. The solution is more funding, not abandoning trial by jury.
Diana Good
London
• Of his experience as a juror, Simons Jenkins writes: “All we knew was that a guilty verdict leading to a jail sentence would be grotesque. Going to prison is not a matter of months. For most people, its consequence is a sentence for life.” There he identifies one of the greatest values of the jury – their ability to decide a case according to conscience. Judges can only apply the law in all its grotesque harshness, whether they like it or not. Abolish juries and we lose that protection against legally sanctioned oppression.
Francis FitzGibbon KC
Barrister, 23ES chambers
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