Thorpe and the silencing of juries
IN THE UK, the merest recollection of what happened during jury deliberations may incur a jail sentence of up to two years.
This was the unlooked-for consequence of a case which arose from the 1979 prosecution of the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe for attempting to shut up a male lover, Norman Scott, by having him murdered – events dramatised in the recent TV drama A Very English Scandal.
The chief witness for the prosecution was MP Peter Bessell, whose evidence of Thorpe’s murderous intentions was credible, except for the fact that he had already sold his story to the Telegraph for a £25,000 down-payment – and a bonus of a further £25,000 if Thorpe was convicted on his testimony.
When jurors were interviewed by journalists, they said that it was the main reason why they had acquitted Thorpe.
The editor of the New Statesman was keen to publish this interview, and I advised him he could do so – it had manifest public interest and there was no law against interviewing jurors.
Conservative Attorney General Michael Havers decided to prosecute the New Statesman.
I had only been a barrister for five years, yet the journal hired me for its defence. I threw myself into research at the British Library and came up with 57 interviews and articles by jurors about their experiences which had been published over the years. The New Statesman was acquitted.
But the spectre of newspapers interviewing jurors after celebrated trials outraged MPs who were also QCs (there were a lot of them at the time) and they procured a draconian amendment to the Contempt of Court Act that made it an imprisonable crime for any juror to dare whisper any detail of what had gone on in the jury room.