Jury Service

Mistress Ruthie has returned from a weekend playing rugby, (since she does enjoy rough games), to discover that she has been called for jury service. Mistress Ruthie, will naturally be forewoman; VM will do what she is told, and the whole process will be oiled by regular supplies of champers into the jury room arranged as a result of Tucker’s attentions to a particularly desperate usher. Should Mistress Ruthie dislike the Judge’s tone, copious notes will be written, and in the event that the Judge makes an error of law in her summing up, in red ink and underlined.

Prior to the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the likes of Mistress Ruthie (and indeed anyone who held a job that required an ability to write in sentences) could avoid jury service by pointing out that they had far more important things to do than decide on someones guilt or innocence. Those kinds of decisions should be left to the kind of people for whom attending court was simply alternative entertainment to daytime TV. Ironically the liklihood of having a jury competent to understand a case, was inversely proportionate to its length and complexity, as anyone who had six months free to sit through a trial truly had nothing better to do. Ruthie therefore never bought the argument that fraud was a special case and should be tried before a judge alone, Ruthie rather took the view that perverse decisions occurred possibly because the jury consituted was simply not collectively capable of grappling with the complexities.

Jury trial is prized as “trial by ones peers” and this should apply equally if you are a company director, or indeed, a High Court Judge.

Three challenges to the notion that the whole of humanity should now sit on juries are currently before the House of Lords. Two men will claim that their right to a fair trial was breached because the juries that found them guilty included a police officer, and one that the jury contained a lawyer from the Crown Prosecution Service.

Ruthie thinks there may be an argument for the conviction in the second case to be quashed; in this case the defendant, Richard Green was convicted of ABH and carrying a needle that he had used to inject himself with heroin. The Police Sergeant searching Green pricked himself on the needle in Green’s pocket that Green said that he had forgotten about. The Police officer serving on the jury worked in the same borough as the sergeant that had been assaulted.

Ruthie thinks the issue here is not that Police Officers per se should be banned from serving on juries, rather that the connection between the victim and the juror was too close. Ruthie thinks it is comparable to the victim and the juror working for the same company but in different offices. It is unclear whether the two actually knew one another.

In the same way that not all men with long hair live in a commune or listen to heavy metal, not all police officers are right wing reactionaries. Ruthie however thinks that once exceptions start being made for certain sections of the population it will again open the door to many more people bunking off. Unless the juror has an obvious connection to the victim or direct interest in the outcome of the case, defendants must take their juries, like their victims as they find them.