In October a dreaded letter arrived out of the blue. Some malevolent machine had drawn my name out of the unlucky lottery, and I was summoned to appear for Jury Duty.
It is quite an inverse lottery. According to the letter about 200,000 are chosen at random every year from the electoral register for two weeks jury duty.
I did a little asking around and found some people who had already done jury duty including one person who already been summoned twice. What was it like I asked with the most common response was, “boring!” How accurate a summary that proved to be!
My first shock came when about forty of us were asked to fill in a questionnaire about the possibility of serving on an 8-week trial which would conclude after Christmas. Your responses are fed into the presiding judge, and I must have given cogent reasons, as I swerved that one.
Then you wait and wait and wait to be called. The room in which we waited, the jury assembly area, was not seen at its best on that first morning. It was a dark horrible day, and the light did not seem to get very far in. It was a bit better when the sun came up for subsequent days.
As I looked around the assembly area it did not seem quite the cross section of the great British public that I had assumed would be present. Of 200 or so people only five were from obvious minority ethnic groups and only one had a clear physical disability.
In fact, I waited until after Wednesday lunch time when I was one of 15 called to make a jury. Why 15? Well, there are always 3 spare at the start of the trial in case they discover that they know any of the participants either side of the dock. 12 names are chosen by lottery and then become the jury if there are no problems.
For our first trial about 25% of the time was taken up by the judge slowly going through how the case would be dealt with and our work, roles and responsibilities as a juror. This was cut considerably for the second trial because we had all done at least one trial. This process was very fair to all concerned and especially the accused who could see fairness being shown at every stage of the proceedings.
On reflection after both trials that I took part in came to an end I had to ask myself, “why had anyone bothered?” Of course, you cannot go into details of the cases, but they had one crucial thing in common. They were one man’s word against another.
Two tired barristers in each case sought to convince the jury that their version of events was right. But the problem, in both cases was the lack of corroboration. Given that we had to find someone guilty beyond reasonable doubt how could you do that when it was essentially one person’s word against another? In both cases the jury deliberations were over in about 10 minutes. In both cases we thought we knew the truth but there was no way that we could make a definitive case for or against guilt and in those circumstances, we were reminded over and over again that we had to have no reasonable doubt and if we had the verdict had to be not guilty.
That was, to me, the most reassuring part of the process. The judge and the prosecuting barrister in addition to the defending barrister hammered home again and again that the highest level of certainty was required to make a conviction. That is British justice at its best.
However, I can only conclude that the system as a whole is British justice at its most mediocre. Of the 10 days that I ‘voluntarily’ gave to the State I was effectively used for only 2 of them. My time and those of my fellow jurors seemed to be of little value in the system as the time needs of judges and barristers took precedence.
I believe that it is not beyond the wit of man to improve the system. I have no doubt at all that Judges and Barristers were doing other things before 10/10.30 when the court convened and carried on working after 4.00 when the court closed. That work could surely have been systematised into more coherent chunks with judges, in particular, allocating time for other work outside what might be normal court sitting hours.
There was a whole system snarled up by waiting and poor systems. That costs money and delays justice. Someone needs to sort out these systems. It is certainly an area that Lib Dems need to look at if we are to speed up the justice systems and involve more people in a meaningful way in the process.
* Cllr Richard Kemp CBE is Lord Mayor of Liverpool for 2024-2025.
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14 Comments
I was called for jury service a couple of years ago during a brief lull in Covid restrictions. I arrived as required on the first day (in York) only to be told that the court wouldn’t be sitting that day and I should turn up at the same time the following day.
On day 2 the jurors sat in the jury room where we watched a video about how trials worked – I learnt nothing that I hadn’t previously picked up from watching TV programmes like Kavanagh QC. After waiting until early afternoon we were told that the accused had decided to plead guilty and we would not be required that day either.
As instructed that evening I phoned the court to hear a recorded message telling me that I could consider my jury service finished. Two days of my time wasted and I never even saw the inside of a court room. All of the jurors no doubt claimed travel expenses. Apparently this happens a lot. The whole process struck me as very inefficient. I do not have the expertise to say how the process can be improved (without of course compromising justice) but it does seem that some sort of reform is desirable.
I think we should be careful about changing a centuries old system that in general gives people accused of crimes a fair trial.
My experience of jury service was not unlike Richard’s and Kevin’s. I did actually do two trials and ended up as jury foreman on one of them. On that one the jury was hopelessly split between those who just knew the accused was guilty and those, like me, who thought that the case had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt. It fell to me to tell the judge that not verdict was possible and the accused had the case against him dismissed.
The very nature of random selection of people to attend court and people to serve on particular juries inevitably means that some people don’t actually get on a jury and others get on two or more. It isn’t time wasting if it serves to give people a fair trial.
I was called up for jury duty back in 2008, but for a court nowhere near where I lived. I was refused a request to send me to a nearby location. It was set for near the end of a particularly large and time-critical project at work, so needless to say my employers were not pleased and I was pretty much forced to defer.
After the deferral period elapsed, I was told I still had to go to the same court. Work made it clear they would not pay me while I was away (so glad I ended up quitting that job shortly afterwards!), and so I was going to need to rely on claiming back expenses from the court to cover loss of earnings.
Day before I was due to start jury service, I had a phone call telling me that they had too many jurors and gave me the choice of still turning up but potentially being sent home, deferring again, or cancelling my jury duty. I cancelled.
Funnily enough, my mum was also called up for duty while I was on my deferral. She was pretty much sat around except for a brief moment on one day when she was called for a case that ended up being dropped before the trial had started.
The criminal justice system is massively underfunded and how and why the law works as it does is almost as badly understood by most politicians as it is by the general public. There was a barristers strike over legal aid fees lasting several months earlier this year, yet it completely passed the party by – as far as I’m aware, not even a single comment from either of our justice spokespersons.
Legal aid funding, trial delays, court closures, overcrowded prisons, the quality of rehabilitation and support for ex-offenders, disclosure issues, miscarriages of justice, reoffending rates, concerns raised here about jurors experience of jury duty – none of these are things to be looked at in isolation.
Given the way some of the comments might go, I thought it would be worth posting this advice on discussing trials from the gov.uk website:
Discussing the trial –
Do not discuss the trial with anyone until it’s finished, except with other jury members in the deliberation room.
After the trial you must not talk about what happened in the deliberation room, even with family members. You can talk about what happened in the courtroom.
Do not post comments about the trial on social media websites like Facebook or Twitter – even after the trial’s finished. This is contempt of court and you can be fined or sent to prison.
https://www.gov.uk/jury-service/discussing-the-trial
“After waiting until early afternoon we were told that the accused had decided to plead guilty and we would not be required that day either…..The whole process struck me as very inefficient.”
That depends on what you mean by inefficient and whether you consider an efficient system fully compatible with a fair trial.
The problem Court staff have is that they know from experience that a proportion of cases with not proceed, for example because the defendant chooses to plead guilty at the last minute. The options are to assume that all trials will go ahead and book court, judge and juries accordingly. If they do that then when trials don’t proceed they get empty courts and judges and juries sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Or to assume that some trials won’t proceed and book more trials than they have space or judges and juries to accomodate. If they do that then sometimes more or fewer trials will proceed than expected and they either get empty courts etc or send defendants away without their case being heard.
Of course the court staff should be open with jurors. Also jurors should be fairly compensated for their time and trouble.
I thank Keith Legg for his concern, since my comments did not refer to any particular court or trial, I think I am within the rules. In any event it was more than 7 years ago and would think the statute of limitations would apply
I have huge concerns about seeking “efficiency” in the justice system. Have people advocating this not seen what chasing that impossible goal has done to the NHS? For any system which deals with humans to work at all there has to be slack built in. You cannot have perfect efficiency. You need spare capacity because humans are unpredictable and chaotic and will not be slotted into neat little boxes.
I’m sure it would be possible to make jury service less boring for participants, given funding that (as John Lib Dem’s comment illustrates) is not available under the current government who are systematically starving all of our infrastructure of funding. But please, please, PLEASE do not make that mean jurors are only booked after trials are absolutely certain to go ahead, because this would make our already creaking justice system even less fair.
My only jury service was over 40 years ago. I believe that I am now over the maximum age. My experience was not too different from Richard’s. I spent half the time at the courts – the rest of the time, we had been told that we would be no longer needed that day, so I went on to my normal work. Another quarter was spent waiting to ensure that there were enough jurors for trials to proceed; at that time each defendant’s barrister could summarily object to 7 jurors just before that juror was sworn in; to be safe a 7 defendant case needed 49 spare potential jurors! We were also warned that one upcoming trial – a complex fraud with many defendants – could last many weeks. I seem to remember that, at that time, jurors were ratepayers and largely white and male, though there was a reasonable class spread.
My experience:
Week 1:
Case a) The first evidence was CCTV footage. There was then a legal argument, for which we were sent out, over whether the flesh-and-blood witnesses should be required to watch this. The judge ruled they should; this meant the trial would take longer than planned so it had to be deferred.
Case b) In an early cross-examination it emerged that the rules on identification evidence had not been properly followed, so the case was dismissed.
Week 2: we waited around all week but were never called into court. The judge was kind enough to come up to our room on the last day to apologise for this.
Happily I lived close enough to the court to go home for lunch. Incidentally cyclists can claim travelling expenses; walkers like me cannot. Despite this experience I broadly agree with the comments above about the pursuit of efficiency. If you are a juror and want to avoid boredom? Take a book with you.
I sat on a jury over 20 years ago. Like Richard, the first case consisted of “You did it”, “No, I didn’t”. It was an assault case. Theprosecution evidence included a statement that a window was broken. The defendant said it wasn’t broken. The defendant was accused of hiding behind a hedge. He said he couldn’t have done that, as there wasn’t a hedge! We felt that there should have been corroborating police evidence on these two points: was the window broken or not and was there a hedge? As it was, we just had two personal examinations, of the defendant and of the assaultee, with no-one else giving any evidence at all. We were told one of them was clearly lying and we should acquit unless we were convinced of guilt beyond reasonable doubt; so of course we had to acquit, though we felt it likely that the assault had been committed by the defendant. After the case, we found ouselves going down in the left with the acquitted defendant, who thanked us rather smirkingly for acquitting him. It made us very uncomfortable.
Since we are adding our personal anecdotes, here is mine.
I was on the jury for a case of assault. A man had beaten his partner with a chair leg and we saw graphic photos of the large bruises he has caused. This was not disputed, and we were directed by the judge that any unwanted contact constituted assault.
But in the jury room classic misogyny emerged, focussing on the fact that the woman had thrown hot tea over him because he was lazing on the sofa. Several of them said that she deserved the beating so wanted to find the man not guilty. I argued for a guilty vote but couldn’t persuade enough of them. In the end we took so long discussing it that the judge called us back in and ordered a retrial – he had guessed what was going on in the jury room.
I think there needs to be more support for the victims of crime that’s for sure. Victim support is underfunded and the mental and physical trauma crime brings to victims cannot be under-estimated. Please remember that many people have hidden disabilities so could also be called up for jury service. Disability is not always visible.
In the USA jury service is much more automated. On each day of your jury service you call an automated line and enter your juror number. The system then tells you if you are required/not required on the day. Saves going to the court house and waiting around only to be told you aren’t needed. Much more efficient.