I’m very much against these proposals, for the reasons put forward in the MP’s debate.
Certainly something needs to be done, the system isn’t working fairly, hasn’t for years, but giving increased sentencing powers to lay magistrates will only make matters worse, and will increase the time pressures and the delays in magistrates' courts, and taking away the automatic right to be tried by jury on indictable offences is an assault on our rights.
Magistrates first – I don’t want to be offensive to anyone who is a magistrate, but they simply don’t have enough training or experience for the powers that they already have. They tend, if anything, to be too lenient, and they make a lot of bad decisions too. A long time ago we had Stipendiary Magistrates, qualified lawyers who sat alone, who got through cases at about 3 times the speed of lay magistrates and who were far more likely to get it right. We still have them, they are now called District Judges, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth – there’s just one, for example, in the whole of North Yorkshire.
Moving on now to the more serious cases that end up in the Crown Court, the problem with whoever sits in judgement of the facts is that they can’t help bringing their own prejudices with them, it’s human nature. Judges try very hard to leave their views and prejudices at home, but not all of them are able to do so. With juries, there are 12 individuals that also have their own prejudices, but the law of averages says that they should balance out, so the whole process should be much fairer – not perfect but by far the better option, and of course they have valuable life experiences that help them to understand the true background to the cases they hear – for example, it’s very likely that there will be several jurors on a case who have been unemployed, who struggle to pay their way in life, who have been in pubs where most of the customers are ignorant of the law and who have a criminal outlook, that simply doesn’t apply to highly-paid judges who are highly educated and who mix in very different social circles. Juries tend to be balanced, judges can only try to be balanced.
I think that this proposal is about two separate but related things
- Reducing human rights for the poor
- Saving money.
The ‘need’ to do something is all about the fact that all governments, regardless of their political leanings, have seriously cut the funding for the entire criminal justice system for years. There aren’t anywhere near enough Courtrooms, Judges or defence lawyers, that’s the cause of the problem, aggravated by the very low rates paid for criminal defence, and the minimum 8-month delay in actually paying the lawyers, and of course it’s now even more difficult to get legal aid, with the result that most ordinary working people have to somehow find a way of paying for their legal defence costs, and it’s only the criminals who don’t.
Disclaimer: I have never been arrested and doubt whether I ever will be, but I’m concerned about the innocent people who are, and there’s a long history of miscarriages of justice.
www.bbc.co.uk
