27 July  2004

The Times

A juror's guilty verdict on our courts: class-ridden and cruelly incompetent

Dinah Birch

GOVERNMENT rhetoric urges us to see young offenders as parasites. After a recent term of jury service I have come to believe that the reverse is often true. What I saw was the professional middle-class making a comfortable living out of acts of blundering defiance among the uneducated. It was disturbing.

I was involved in a series of fairly minor trials, though they were life changing for the participants. Delivering a verdict is always a serious matter. But that responsibility did not come my way, for not one of these cases reached a conclusion.

They collapsed for various reasons. On one occasion the judge directed acquittal because the evidence was not presented in accordance with the law. A mistake from a court official was enough to halt another trial. In general, deficiencies of paperwork on the part of defence teams or the Crown Prosecution Service were to blame. Witnesses were summoned on the wrong day, records were misplaced, or had failed to reach the right people.

Over and over again legal processes were aborted because someone had not done the job he was paid to do. The bewigged judges would turn to the expectant jury and explain with serene courtesy that unfortunately, for this reason or that, matters could not continue. No doubt some one could calculate how much public money was lost. The distress of witnesses and defendants left high and dry would be harder to measure.

It was not a wholly dispiriting fortnight. My fellow jurors were cheerful, thoughtful and astonishingly long-suffering. We were a large and diverse group.

Nearly everyone was prepared to exercise limitless patience. What jurors mostly do is wait. They are confined to a noisy assembly area like a giant airport lounge, smelling of hairspray and yesterday's chips. Occasionally an official calls those who are to serve on a new trial. Some are never named, or are dismissed before their trial begins. It is possible, and not uncommon, to reach the end of a period of duty without serving on any jury.

Various occupations whittled away the time. Groups for gossip and mild flirtation formed. There is a subsistence payment -less than £5 a day -that must be spent in the busy cafeteria. Calculations of how many cups of tea and plates of pie would absorb exactly the sum allowed were the source of much entertainment.

Knitting was popular, in response to an appeal for squares to be stitched into charitable blankets. More women than you might imagine retain that skill.

Unexpectedly, the most capable knitter in the room was a burly man in his mid-thirties, who regularly took commissions for christening shawls.

Those in the dock came from a different world. Our society is still split from top to bottom along the lines of class, and a few days in court will soon remind you of that. Exclusively male, and mostly young, the defendants I saw were the victims of neglect, drugs and drink, more or less in that order. They were there because they had not been taught to live better. One or two seemed barely to have been taught to speak.

Saddest of all was the sense that it was the best in these wrongdoers, rather than the worst, that had condemned them. These were boys with the obscure knowledge that they have been cheated, and no means of understanding quite what it is they have lost. A refusal to accept defeat explodes in randomly destructive acts of violence or senseless theft. In better circumstances the same spark would have made them successful men.

Juries are not unaffected by the pressures of class. I watched a defence barrister take a young police officer apart. He was a big man with a braying accent, confident and aggressive. The policeman was a skinny local boy, inarticulate, not coping, and eventually in tears. When the jury was asked to withdraw for five minutes, everyone was incandescent, and bent on convicting the accused just to punish the barrister. Class feeling dominated the room. In fact the defence lawyer was clearly right, though he was going about his task an utterly inept manner, and the judge dismissed the case because of inadequacies in police evidence. But it was a revealing moment.

Experiences such as mine will soon be more widely shared. In April reforms to the Criminal Justice Act enlarged the pool of potential jurors to include almost all voters. Deferral might be possible, but excusal will be rare. This is needed if the system is to survive, for unrepresentative juries cannot function properly.

But it will expose the justice system to more searching scrutiny. Self-serving incompetence is not a crime, but the damage it can do to the social fabric runs almost as deep.