I was intrigued by a report in The Times which described evidence they have uncovered of some 40 examples of jurors making comments on sites such as Twitter or Facebook about cases in which they were involved.
Not the cases where the breach of the rules was a flagrant one, but those which broadcast to their friends their opinion that ‘the defendant is guilty’, & a legal expert was quoted as saying that this shows that the juror was ignoring their duty to decide, to make up their mind, to form a fixed & considered view, only after hearing all the evidence.
I am not saying that it is all right to let one’s opinions be known in this fashion, but I am rather taken aback by the notion that one can somehow have no view on the matter until it is over. This does not seem to fit with human psychology when you decide where to go on holiday, what to have for dinner, what to wear - & then change your mind. A match is not decided until after the last ball is bowled, whatever your earlier opinion of what the outcome would be.
I have never served on a jury but I have in my time sat in the public gallery through a number of court cases, in the 1960s as a student & more recently for a week in the Crown Court which I had originally entered, as part of my historical research, just to see what the interior of a Victorian courthouse looked like, & stayed to find out the outcome of various trials.
There had been a lot of changes since the 1960s. The most obvious being that there were no member s of the public in the galleries of the Courts I attended; apart from a group of earnest sixth form or college students taking diligent notes one day, & two well-dressed middle aged ladies one morning (were they training to be magistrates, I wondered?) the only people there were friends or family of the accused, or the victim, or on one fraught afternoon, both.
I was really taken aback by the amount of time that the well of the court & the bench were empty; there might be a clerk sitting there, lawyers wandering in & out, but otherwise no clue as to what was going on or when proceedings might begin.
On two occasions there was a defendant in the dock while we waited – one with no guard at all, until the case got under way. The other – a seasoned criminal as it turned out – was awaiting sentence & did have a guard sitting next to him. Three friends of his were up in the public gallery, & when he realised that no one was going to stop him he turned round to have a chat with them. After the judge had come, pronounced the complicated details of the sentence, & gone, it was the friends who called out to him how long he was actually going to have to serve – Oh, that’s good, he said. I was expecting more than that.
Nor were there any attendants in the corridors to tell you what was going on; I was completely free to roam, going in & out of the old courtrooms as the spirit moved me (though I always had to go through the metal detector at the entrance to the building).
It was completely different in the modern extension. Security was tight here, corridors short & there seemed to be only one entrance to each court; all I could see, through the small window in the heavy door, was a bewigged barrister on their feet.
I studied the incomprehensible schedules on the wall in the entrance lobby – pushed aside sometimes by a barrister in a hurry checking which court they were in; no comprehensible information about what was going on inside, so I went to the busy reception desk.
It was clearly a great novelty to be asked which court might actually have a trial going on that I could go into as an ordinary member of the public. After consulting her colleague, the lady said that Court X should be in session, a case of armed robbery; all I had to do was open the door, bow to the judge & move towards the seats at the back.
I did not have the nerve for that.
Now if I really wanted to observe a full trial I could have used friends & contacts to be my guide, pull strings, whatever, but I was interested in finding out how anyone could get to see justice in action. It is, to put it mildly, difficult. For a whole variety of reasons the system seems to have turned in on itself, something for lawyers & accused, with a distant nod of concern to those who have been on the receiving end of criminal behaviour.
But in no case that I have observed, whether back in the more open 60s or at the turn of this century, did I feel that I would be taken completely aback by the jury’s verdict – whatever it turned out to be.
There are three basic questions to be decided before the final Guilty or Not Guilty: did the event complained of actually take place? Did the defendant do it? And, if so, did that amount to the crime with which they are charged?
No jury went for what seemed the least likely verdict.
The longest trial I witnessed spread over three days & seemed set for one or two more the next week, but I had had enough.
The main feeling I was left with from the most recent experience however is that I should not like to be on a jury – they were shockingly badly treated. Presumably they have no more idea of what is going on, of when they might be called into court, than I had as a spectator.
The jury box seemed unchanged from Victorian times, dreadfully uncomfortable to have to sit in for more than about 10 minutes at a time. Fortunately though they quite often had a chance to get up & stretch their legs as they were sent out while lawyers made legal submissions, then led back in again in single file, like naughty school children.
Many cases these days spread over weeks or months, which must make it especially difficult for some jurors – those who seem surgically attached to their mobile phone & Twitter feeds – to obey the injunction to keep completely quiet about what is occupying so much of their time in between long bouts of boredom & just sitting around waiting.
