Trial by jury no longer guarantees justice

Why is it considered an ancient liberty that must be defended at all costs, to have guilt or innocence decided by a dozen people who would rather be anywhere else than stuck in a stuffy courtroom being in turn bored and bamboozled by barristers?

Who says that those 12 jury members - open to intimidation, vulnerable to romance and faction fighting, susceptible to corruption or simply to listening to their iPods under their hijabs - can guarantee that justice will be done.

Much has been said about the “maverick” nature of the jury that returned a mixed bag of verdicts last week in what the Crown thought was an open-and-shut case against eight men accused of plotting to blow up transatlantic aircraft. A retrial is on the cards, so it would be unwise to discuss the possible foibles of that jury. But there are many cases in which the jury system has been found lacking.

I have reported on dozens of important criminal cases in the British courts, including every high-profile terrorist trial since 2003, and have seen jurors who approach their duty with great diligence. But increasingly, especially in trials likely to last more than a month or two, jurors give the impression of being frustrated and distracted.

Most big cases begin with a parade of potential jurors queueing up to tell the judge why they should be excused because of holiday, work, illness or some other reason. The remnants - usually those not bright enough to come up with a half-decent excuse - are left to try some of the most complicated cases.

Listening to the swearing of the juror's oath can be painful, as barely literate jurors struggle to read the words on the card in their hand. Trial by your peers can mean placing your fate in the hands of someone who can only just read aloud.

Britain's first al-Qaeda case was tried at Leicester Crown Court in 2003 and teetered on the brink of collapse for 10 weeks because several jurors were paralysed by fear. One woman was physically sick at mention of the name of Osama bin Laden, and two juries had to be discharged after pronouncing themselves too scared or too prejudiced to try the case. The case was completed by a third jury, which limped home with nine members.

While jurors can be of questionable quality, a greater problem still is that the criminal justice system sets out deliberately to handicap them. Long before a case gets to trial, lawyers and judges spend months weeding out elements of the evidence that the jury cannot hear. When the 12 men and women take their seats in the jury box they do not know that they will hear only a partial version of the case.

Take the ricin trial in 2003. Most of the defendants were acquitted of plotting to conduct a terrorist attack by spreading home-made ricin and other toxins. But the jury was not given the full story: it was not told that a key defendant had murdered a police officer while on the run, nor about the protective clothing, knives, replica weapons and gas masks found inside Finsbury Park mosque during raids connected to the investigation.

Crucial evidence was withheld from the jury in last year's fertiliser bomb case. Jurors were not told that two men with the defendants in police surveillance photos were Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, the July 7 London bombers. Was that association not relevant to deciding whether the men in the dock had terrorist intent?

It isn't just terrorism cases. At Bristol Crown Court in 1999 jurors acquitted Gary Glitter of sexually assaulting a schoolgirl. Minutes after returning their verdicts, they learnt for the first time that the former pop star had admitted amassing a huge library of 4,000 child abuse images. The law decided that, if the jurors were to know that he was a self-confessed paedophile, it would prejudice his trial for child sex abuse.

While it was possible for lawyers to keep a jury in the dark in 1999, it is increasingly difficult in the age of Google. Despite warnings from judges, jurors can, and do, go online to find out more about their cases than they're being told in court.

Juries have also played their part in some of our worst miscarriages of justice, such as the cases of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four. But a judge sitting alone in one of Belfast's Diplock courts threw out the ill-prepared Crown case against Sean Hoey, accused of the Omagh bombing, and a district judge in London called a halt to the fit-up job in which Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian pilot falsely accused of training the 9/11 hijackers, was almost extradited to the US. How would juries have performed in such emotive trials?

The jury system is broken. In long and complex cases it no longer passes muster. Dedicated panels of assessors, respresentative of society and committed to trying cases independently, should be appointed in their stead. A not dissimilar model functions in employment tribunals. And where the jury remains, for shorter, simpler cases, its members should be properly recompensed for loss of earnings, firmly reminded that they are carrying a hefty civic burden and entrusted with the whole truth.

Resource : timesonline.co.uk