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Rumblings over planned moves to limit
the right to trial by jury, bring in majority verdicts in place of unanimous
decisions and change the rule against double jeopardy, are showing little
sign of going away, judging by what a leading crimimal lawyer had to say to
the parliamentary committee which is considering the Criminal Procedure Bill.
QC Donald Stevens joined the Law Society and other high-profile lawyers in
opposing the changes, hailed by Justice Minister Phil Goff as together making
up one of the most important recent pieces of legislation on criminal
procedures. He's right about that, if the vigorous reactions engendered by
the proposals are anything to go by. Yet the Greens are the only political
party to oppose the bill. Might that not at least partly be
because what is in the bill reflects public concerns about the justice
system? There is considerable exasperation, for example, at the number of
juries which over the years have been unable to reach a verdict, the
suspicion being that most of them have "hung" because one of the 12
people on the jury has held out against everyone else. That doesn't make that
person wrong and the rest right, of course, but it is often seen as flying in
the face of common sense and human nature. Better 10 guilty people be set
free than one innocent person be sent to prison? The adage is often employed
in support of unanimous verdicts, but the rising fear nowadays is that too
often the guilty are getting off because a clever lawyer has been able,
inevitably, to bamboozle one of the 12 -- which is all it takes. Similar sentiments are to be heard
with regard to the doctrine of double jeopardy. Again, common sense suggests
that if someone confesses to murder, for instance, after they had earlier
been acquitted of it, or some new and compelling other evidence comes to
light, then it ought to be possible for that person to be again charged with
committing the same crime. The legal purists might throw up their hands in
horror at such a watering down of the hitherto rigid ban on double jeopardy,
but it is a fair bet that a street poll would find an overwhelming majority
of ordinary people in favour of the change. If the object of the exercise is
also to speed up the administration of justice, then making more provision
for judges to hear complex cases such as fraud by themselves, without a jury,
is a sensible reform too. However, it is important that the right to a
hearing by one's peers is retained, which would mean more judge-alone trials
provided the defence didn't object. It is vital that people are not locked
out of the justice system, which is why juries must continue to matter
despite the number of critics who seem to know better. Juries are, if you
like, the ultimate bastion of common sense, recognition that one way or
another, we all count. One more thing: The perils of wearing two hats was driven
home to Boris Johnson recently when the Tory shadow arts minister was
keelhauled for things he wrote about Liverpool in the Spectator, of which he
is the editor. Without repeating what he had to say about the Hillsborough
soccer stadium tragedy and the murder of hostage Ken Bigley in Iraq, suffice
to say it led to people declaring they would only read the Spectator if it
was dipped in Dettol. As for the hapless Mr Johnson, he checked in at a
backstreet hotel in |
