Top judge puts Zoom jury trial plan in dock

CRIMINAL trials should not be heard remotely after the pandemic is over, one of England’s top judges has said.

Judge Sally Cahill QC, president of the Council of Her Majesty’s Circuit Judges, said that jury trials should be about justice, not “efficiency” amid the rising backlog of cases in Crown Courts.

“The idea that a criminal trial can be heard in any way remotely is just not possible,” she told the annual Bar and Young Bar Conference on Saturday.

“Defendants have a right to be present in court. Generally speaking, they should all be present, as should the jury in my view.”

Judge Cahill said that remote trials mean it is harder for judges to instruct jurors.

“What we’re there to do is to deliver justice, not necessarily efficiency.

“I’ve thought very hard about which are those cases where I can see a jury being effective remotely, and so far I’ve drawn a blank.

“I just can’t see a situation where, other than in another pandemic, it would be appropriate to have juries remotely.”

The Government’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is due to bring in powers to allow jury trials to be conducted remotely – though it is understood to be seen more as a failsafe rather than the default for trials.

The current backlog of Crown Court cases is almost 61,000, with a report by the National Audit Office finding that the number of cases older than a year had increased by more than 300 per cent, to 11,379, since March 2020. A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “These laws will replace the emergency measures that allowed the rapid rollout of remote technology to keep justice running throughout the pandemic.

“These measures will give courts the flexibility to make the best use of remote technology in future.”

Efforts to make the criminal justice system more modern and flexible are due to be taken even further through disputes in the civil courts.

Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, is overseeing a digital revolution of the civil justice system, with the

‘We’re there to deliver justice, not necessarily efficiency’

development of an online “Claims R Us” to ease the burden on courts.

He told the conference: “Technology provides an opportunity to allow all cases to go to a single point of entry on a website where anybody can go.

“The aim will be on the resolution that will not be exacerbating the dispute.

“Young people today expect to get everything on their mobile phone, on their computer.

“They simply don’t accept that the only way to do justice is to go a long way, spend a lot of money travelling, waiting around, go into an old building and wait for an old man in funny clothes to come and sit on the bench. That is utterly absurd.

“The most important thing about this is that slow delivery of civil justice is a tremendous economic drag on our society.”