UK Law Articles
These articles are reproduced from old newspapers. Whether you are looking for old articles about the Lord Chancellor's Department, or trying to find stories on solicitors, judges or courts, the law teacher article database is here to help you. You will find these articles useful for writing your law essays, law dissertations and law coursework.
The Times
October 6 1998
Greater use should be made of magistrates' courts, says Michael Zander
The real cost of trial by jury
Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, will need a steady nerve to go through with plans to curb an accused's right to jury trial, in the face of opposition from lawyers and civil libertarians (The Times, September 8, and Letters, September 17). But the arguments in favour of the change are overwhelming.
The issue is being presented by critics of the proposal as if it were mainly about the savings that can be achieved by transferring cases from the Crown Court to the less-costly magistrates' court. The high principle of the availability of jury trial should not be sacrificed to the Treasury's base demands. But this is a great over-simplification.
Parliament prescribes the cases that are so serious they must be tried in the Crown Court, or so minor that they must be tried by magistrates. But in intermediate (either-way) cases, the defendant can choose.
In its report in 1993, the Runciman Royal Commission unanimously recommended a new rule: that if the two sides in either-way offences cannot agree in which court the case should be tried, that decision should instead be taken by the magistrates - after hearing representations from both sides.
This recommendation attracted criticism, but not a single member of the commission was persuaded by the furore that it was wrong.
In the kind of case for which it is appropriate - a person with no prior conviction, charged with shoplifting - jury trial would be agreed between the two sides or be ordered by the court.
The reason the commission's 11 members agreed that the decision should be for the court rather than the defendant was not that it had anything against jury trial as such. On the contrary, the commission strongly supported jury trial. Nor did it merely want to see public money saved. But it concluded that giving the defendant a choice in either-way cases had several disadvantages.
First, in most cases where a defendant asks for jury trial, he actually ends up pleading guilty, often at the door of the court. The vaunted benefits of jury trial plainly do not apply to such cases. It is not just that the cost and time involved in preparing these cases are wasted. The preparation involved increases delays for others.
Also, Crown Court trial works to the considerable disadvantage of the convicted defendant. Defendants charged with either-way offences are three times more likely in similar cases to get a custodial sentence in the Crown Court than in the magistrates' court. Likewise, custodial sentences in the Crown Court are about two and a half times as long as for similar cases dealt with by magistrates. In one study, about a third of those who elected for trial by jury said later that they regretted their choice.
These are all practical reasons. But there are also important reasons of principle. Some argue that the defendant ought to have a right to elect for jury trial because it gives him a better chance of an acquittal. In the royal commission's view, this is much the same as saying that the defendant ought to be able to choose a lenient judge. The fact that, for whatever reasons, juries acquit around 40 per cent, where magistrates acquit 25 per cent, is not in itself a reason to give defendants the choice.
There is only one justification for dealing with the case by the more costly, the more careful and the better quality system of jury trial. That is the seriousness of the offence, either intrinsically or because of the potential effect of conviction. The seriousness of the case is a question best determined objectively by the system rather than subjectively by a defendant.
In Scotland, the decision is made by the prosecutor. The royal commission
considered that where prosecution and defendant cannot agree, magistrates aided
by statutory guidelines would be capable of identifying the cases that merited
jury trial.
