Just as a cash-strapped administration looks for ways of streamlining justice by curbing jury trials, by a nice coincidence academic researchers have come up with the idea of holding jury hearings remotely over the internet. According to a study just released by academics from Exeter, El Paso and Cornell, volunteer mock jurors from New York State seem to have maintained roughly similar levels of concentration and enagagement whether deliberating remotely or in person.
The current difficulty with jury trials is not so much inefficiency as the unsuitability of many of the cases subject to them
You can hear the suggestions already: might this let the Government solve the jury conundrum without tinkering with the immemorial right of the citizen to be tried by his peers? Might it even get extra credit for empowering those happier online than offline and getting the law to embrace cutting-edge technology? Up to a point, Lord Copper. There are rather more difficulties than meet the eye about this proposal, despite its futuristic appeal.
For one thing, the parallel isn’t that close. The study involved a fictitious civil case concerning personal injury, not a criminal one involving the much higher stakes of a defendant’s liberty. And it happened in New York, where jury trial is ingrained in popular conscience and indeed at times constitutionally protected, even in civil matters. Whether this tells us a great deal about what would happen in England, where juries are far more limited, and service on them is seen as more a chore than a source of pride, is doubtful.
The experiment involved volunteers, who with the best will in the world, will have been perfectly aware that the whole episode involved an element of make-believe. Would the results obtained with these earnest helpers readily translate to twelve citizens dragooned more or less unwillingly into dealing with a county lines drug-dealing case on a wet Thursday at Snaresbrook, where matters are in deadly earnest? On that the jury, so to speak, is very much out.
Furthermore, would WFH juries actually save much trouble? True, you would avoid some physical hiccups (‘The bus broke down: I do apologise for keeping your Honour and everyone else waiting’). But there is plenty of scope for new and original hassles. Co-ordinating and keeping going twelve perhaps dodgy online connections would worry any court official; installing reliable ones ad hoc would take away much of the savings that resulted. Assuming we keep the principle of random jury selection, there would also presumably have to be scope for a jury sitting partly at home and partly in court – one could hardly exclude a computer-illiterate potential juror for that reason alone. The mind gently boggles.
The list scrolls on. You can easily tell if a juror in court is nodding off or surfing the internet. But without highly intrusive surveillance it would be very difficult to know whether any particular juror at home was paying proper attention: and it would be almost impossible to detect if they looked aside briefly to obtain online information about the case not given in open court (as, being human, they would undoubtedly be tempted to). Unless families were summarily turfed out of jurors’ homes for the duration, the scope for interruptions and interference would also be multiplied manyfold.
Assume, however, all this can be sorted out. Just suppose we do get a faster, cheaper and more streamlined jury system humming along. It still wouldn’t solve very much except on a Labour accountant’s spreadsheet.
The current difficulty with jury trials is not so much inefficiency as the unsuitability of many of the cases subject to them. True, there are some cases where lay input is important: it is very salutary that, for example, the state should have to convince twelve of its citizens that a householder went beyond proper self-defence against a burglar, or that a statement on racial politics went beyond what was acceptable. But for the ordinary case of theft or fraud, it’s not apparent that there is any such need. in certain cases, such as those involving criminal damage in the case of political protest, it is positively worrying that we should allow defendants to muddy the waters by calling on jurors essentially to set aside the law: think the case of the Colston statue in Bristol about three years ago, or the perverse acquittal of climate activists who vandalised Stonehenge last year.
There are certainly problems with the jury system. But they require serious thought to solve them. The idea that it’s all a matter of applying some new streamlined technology has always had its appeal for some. For the rest of us, by contrast, it is – like much that falls from the word processors of earnest academics – frankly a distraction.
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