Jury trial: the movie Coming soon to a big screen near you...
JUSTICE chiefs yesterday unveiled new ‘remote jury centres’ based in cinemas so trials can resume during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The £5.5million scheme will see two jury centres open at Odeon cinema complexes in Edinburgh and Braehead, Renfrewshire, for an initial six months.
From Monday, trials at the High Court sitting in Edinburgh and in Livingston will be seen by jurors in up to five auditoriums at the Odeon at Fort Kinnaird on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
Trials due to start from October 12 at the High Court in Glasgow will use the jury centre at Braehead, Renfrewshire, where there will be 11 screens available.
The arrangements – the first of their kind in the UK – will eventually allow solemn jury trials in the High Court and sheriff courts to run at pre-Covid levels. They will also prevent the backlog of trials, which already stands at more than 750 cases, from increasing.
Courtrooms have been fitted with technology to broadcast trials to the cinema screens and to receive the video wall of jurors.
Jurors will sit physically distanced in seats usually occupied by moviegoers, and watch proceedings on the big screen.
Rather than gather around a table to deliberate, jurors will be allocated individual tables in front of the screens, and use microphones to communicate with each other across the floor.
The contract gives the courts exclusive access to the complexes from 8am on Monday to 6pm on Friday for six months, with the option to extend for longer. The centres will be dismantled on Fridays to accommodate cinemagoers over the weekends.
Cinemas were chosen because they can provide, in a single building, spacious and soundproofed auditoriums that can accommodate 15 physically distanced jurors, and state-of-theart, secure technology.
Tim Barraclough, director of the Judicial Office for Scotland, said the remote arrangement ‘gives us the facility to return ultimately to 16 trials running at any one time, which is where we were pre-Covid’.