The Gray Monk

The jury systems is not ready for scraping. Juries are put in place to balance out the power of judges and law makers. I don't know about the UK but some states in the US the Judge can override the jury verdict, also the jury can return a verdict that the defendant violated the letter of the law but the law is unfair. Plus there is always appeals. Justice is a deliberate process designed to limit the possibility of a innocent person going to jail. It never works the way we like but it does a decent job 90% of the time.

And I would argue that if you cannot get those who are not automatically on the side of the criminal or who are not of sufficient intelligence to override their prejudice and ideology, then the Jury system must end in being discredited. That is what has happened here. Seven of the accused now must be retried in a case that has already cost almost £20 million.

Justice can be served without a jury and is already served very well in the Magistrates courts here. The key is that the Judges must be selected and trained and there have to be a number of checks and balances in place to ensure that when a case is brought to court it is fair and unbiased. Juries merely encourage grandstanding from the Defence Barristers, something I find distasteful and frankly is enough to make me vote for the Prosecution. I am not interested in the emotions or the excuses, give me the facts. Too many Juries here are swayed by emotive grandstanding and obfustication of facts. It has become a commonplace event for a jury to decide its verdict on the "Best Actor" rather than the best presentation of fact.

Having been on the receiving end of too many attempts to rubbish my evidence with flippant distortions or attempts to put words in my mouth - or worse - to attempt to get a "Yes/No" answer to a question where the answer is a lot more complex and the Defence doesn't want the jury to hear something which may damage their client, you may forgive my contempt for the average jury member. Especially those who can't separate their prejudices from the realities.

If juries worked 90% of the time in this country I might support them - the fact is that they don't. I have heard a member of one jury comment that the prosecutions facts didn't matter, the accused was "such a nice boy he can't be guilty." On another a member of the jury expressed the view that the plaintiff must be crooked, "No one with a house like that is short of cash." Or the one who caused a case to collapse because she argued that the expert evidence was too confusing.

Our courts are no longer places in which justice is served - they have become theatres for Barristers and Solicitors who should be required to carry Equity cards. Remove the juries and we might - just - get Justice back into them.

You right about jury swaying by the lawyers. But is a problem with lawyer system. Maybe a military tribunal where the juries are selected have at least a basic understanding of the law and the crime committed. For example a trial about arson would have firemen on the jury. Lawyers should be only allowed to ask questions, the one thing I have always hated was the lawyer dictating the type of answer can give. If they ask a question they have to deal with the answer the witness gives. Having a judge only scares me, I have a serious problem with trusting one person with so power.

The Jury-less system doesn't rely on a single Judge, you have a panel of at least three, Judge President and two (or more in a really complex and serious case) Assessors who weigh all the facts presented in the court. You still have each side trying to pick holes in the other sides evidence, but there are no histrionics and it is a trial of facts, not of acting performance. Of course, the Judges need to be qualified and trained to do this, but once you have the system to deal with that in place it works reasonably well and the Judiciary remains independent of the political system.

Having seen both systems in action, I am of the view that the Jury-less system ends up more balanced and reliable in actually administering justice.

As for the lawyers dictating the answer, that can be overcome in our system, by simply asking the Judge if you may explain the answer to him/her. The answer from the Bench is almost invariably "Yes", and you can then qualify what has been said. As long as the witness knows this, you can play havoc with the defence (or prosecutions) method of questioning. Once, in a Juryless court I was forced into the corner on a leading question, but before I could ask, the Judge demanded that I explain the answer properly - and that got me the opening to qualify the response satisfactorily - in fact it was mentioned in the Judge's summing up that the explanation had been most helpful. It really blew away the Defence case on that point, but it illustrates the point nicely.

The jury-less systems sounds alot like our appeal system in the U.S. It's a panel of judges which determine if the trial followed the law.

In this case, it's quite likely that the jury were confused about what "intent" means. This week I discovered that someone sorting post for a major company that I regularly send lots of documents to, thought that anyone working in the probate department was automatically dead. I received several returned envelopes marked "deceased", suggesting that the entire probate department had been killed in a freak accident. The only explanation I could come up with is that someone told them that probate was something to do with death and had a "durrr..." moment where they decided that all dead employees were transferred to the probate department.

Several months before that, I was told by a native Brit who was really old enough to know better, that she thought London was North of Birmingham. Right...