Juries are the bulwark of our liberties. Do NOT be bamboozled by a TV show (or anybody else) into giving them up

Without a jury, a criminal court is just a roomful of paid state employees deciding how to punish the accused. With a jury, it is a real trial in which the Crown has to prove its case.

it is the most amazing piece of luck that we in Britain have this wonderful safety device. our rulers never meant to give it to us. it grew by a series of accidents.

the right to jury trial in Britain is much more a matter of custom than of absolute law, and would be quite easy to abolish slice by slice while nobody was looking.

Juries are pretty much unique to the Anglosphere, and pre-trial plea-bargaining has gravely weakened the system in the USA.

on most of the planet, there is no such thing. Even in Europe, in practice, there are few independent juries.

in France (where the German occupation was swift to get rid of them in 1940) juries are rare and very unlike ours. they sit with the judge to determine the verdict rather than in private, and so are not fully independent of him.

there was a brief fashion for juries on the Continent in the mid-19th century. But it did not last there or anywhere else. Juries were done away with in Germany in 1924, Singapore and South Africa in 1969, and india in 1973.

So there is no real presumption of innocence in such places. once you are arrested, you are pretty much invariably on a conveyor belt to a prison cell. the only question is how long you will stay there.

Supposed ‘experts’ speculate that juries are wrong a quarter of the time. how can they possibly know? From what i can discover, many of those who actually sit on juries are impressed by the carefulness and responsibility of their fellow jurors. they take this duty seriously.

A NEW series by Channel 4, the Jury: Murder trial, dramatises a trial, with two juries separately asked to reach verdicts on the same case. it is an absurdity. A real jury, where the jurors are not supposed to chat merrily about the trial as they do in the programme, would be very dull TV.

But the C4 version is very unlike a jury. And, goodness, the claim that we are seeing a proper trial is false. i used to cover trials in my 20s, and these snippets of evidence in the TV programme, with little serious questioning, are very unlike the real thing. the idea that this show is some sort of noble and serious experiment is pretty overblown. Ratings are its goal.

in any case, the C4 trial is not about whether the defendant did the crime, the real task of the jury (he admits from the start that he smashed his wife’s head in with a hammer). it is about whether he had so lost control of himself that this action was not murder.

We are deep in the land of psychobabble, in which hard facts (the jury’s sole responsibility) are absent. So it is not a very good test of a jury trial anyway.

here is what you need to know. Establishments all quietly hate juries. this is even though only a tiny percentage of criminal cases ever actually go before a jury, and fewer than half of these generally result in an acquittal.

there is currently a campaign to remove juries from rape trials, even though about 75 per cent of the rape cases that actually reach court result in a conviction. no doubt, if this campaign succeeds, calls will follow for a general removal of juries.

opponents go on about expense and unreliability, but that is not really what they dislike. independent juries are a far greater limit on state power than democracy is. Without them, governments would be able to do what they liked to their enemies by locking them up more or less at will.

in 1688, it was a free jury which saved this country from autocracy. Jurymen defied King James ii in his attempt to imprison seven Church of England bishops who had stood up to his despotic bullying. the verdict triggered James’s flight to France, where he sought shelter with his fellow autocrat Louis XIV. it was, in many ways, the key moment of the Glorious Revolution when this became, for the first time, a free country. Since then political trials in Britain have been virtually impossible.

Without juries, the police would be all-powerful (but not necessarily any better at pursuing crime, and probably even worse). So would magistrates and judges, as they tend to be on the Continent.

Far from being ‘reformed’ to make them weaker, or replaced with panels of supposedly wise judges (there’s not much evidence for the existence of such persons these days), juries badly need to be strengthened.

For instance, we need to bring back unanimous verdicts. Majority verdicts allow judges to rush juries into decisions which may well be wrong, by allowing the pro-conviction men and women in the room to override awkward doubters.

Yet those doubters are quite capable of being right, particularly in cases where (as often happens nowadays) there is a lot of emotion in the courtroom, and not many facts.

the henry Fonda film twelve Angry Men shows just such a reversal, as one man stands against 11 in a jury room.

this could no longer take place in modern Britain because the pestilent reformer Roy Jenkins introduced majority verdicts when he was home Secretary in the 1960s on the pretext of alleged ‘jury-nobbling’ by gangsters. A better answer would have been to prosecute any nobbling attempt with great rigour.

You can’t help thinking that Jenkins wanted a pretext to weaken juries, which he instinctively saw as the enemies of his cultural and moral revolution. Many lawyers and judges were appalled, but Jenkins bulldozed his changes through.

ON JUNE 6, 1967, one of our greatest judges, Lord Denning, put it like this. Saying that unanimous verdicts had operated for 600 years, he declared: ‘it is a fundamental principle of our English law that a jury should be unanimous; and the reason for that principle is that no man should be found guilty unless his guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt.

‘As long as there are twelve good men and true, and one or two of them conscientiously feel strong enough to dissent, that in itself shows that there is reasonable doubt.’

in 1974, the old unfair property qualification for jury service (whereby eligibility was limited to property owners) was abolished. But nothing — such as an education qualification — was put in its place.

So it is now the case that anyone who is on the electoral roll (so at least 18 years old) may sit on a jury and help decide the fate of another human. this must be another argument against the campaign for votes at 16, popular on the Left.

Surely a way can be devised of ensuring this vital job is done only by men and women with some experience of the world?

But even if we cannot agree on such a reform, i would defend the jury, however flawed, against the alternative. it remains, as Sir William Blackstone said nearly 300 years ago ‘ the grand bulwark of his [every Englishman’s] liberties’. Do not be bamboozled, by TV programmes or anybody else, into giving it up.