Before reading this post you may wish to read this BBC News report.A few weeks ago I received a letter in the post requesting me to serve as a juror at my local crown court. I thought this would be quite an interesting experience & a fantastic opportunity to see for myself how our justice system works.
Despite the fact that I have left wing leanings towards anarchism, I - like any other social anarchist - understand the importance of honesty & justice in society. But just to make sure I was prepared for what was expected of me, the night before I was due to attend court I watched Tony Hancock’s
Twelve Angry Men!
The first week in court passed quite uneventfully. I wasn’t required to sit on any cases & I even managed to read two books. The first book I read,
A Riot of Our Own by Johnny Green (The Clash’s tour manger), is brilliant & I would encourage anyone who has an interest in The Clash to read it.
But in the second week of my jury service I was called into Court 5 & sworn onto a jury. We were then all promptly dismissed until the following day as it was too late to start. Amazingly, despite the fact that we had heard no evidence at this point, one person turned around to me on the way out of the courtroom & said "you can see he’s guilty by the way he looks". Admittedly, when the charges against the defendant were read out, six counts of indecent assault & one count of rape, he did look surprisingly arrogant. But hey, we were there to judge him on the evidence.
After six days of sitting through some of the most horrific descriptions of abuse that I’ve ever had to listen to (that is not to say that the offences couldn’t have been worse, they could have been a lot worse, but fortunately I don’t have to listen to people describing such events in so much detail in my daily life, & after this experience I feel very thankful for that) the judge did his summing up. He gave a fair & balanced view based on the evidence in the case up until the concluding part of his statement when he told us to discard the evidence that the defendant had been to his local pub & watched pornographic videos, and declared, "all males go to the pub to watch pornographic videos". I accept that watching pornographic videos at the pub doesn’t make the defendant a rapist, but for a judge sitting on a rape case to say in his summing up "all males go to the pub to watch pornographic videos" is at best incorrect, & in my opinion both crass & extremely inappropriate. Nevertheless, it isn’t for the judge to make the decision. That is why the jury are there, & so off we went to deliberate…
Almost before I had sat down, the foreman of the jury had been decided on by a little group of jurors that had become inseparable over the past week. This comprised the usual suspects who find it highly amusing when people deliberately fart & who think that discussions of the latest fashions show the highest degree of intellect. As you can imagine I wasn’t part of this 'in crowd' & nor did I want to be! The woman they chose as foreman of the jury couldn’t wait to tell everybody that she was a teacher at a public school (private school for any Americans who may read this) & proceeded to treat the jurors like her unruly students cutting people off, ignoring & dismissing comments that she didn’t like wherever possible. Needless to say, there was a difference of opinion between us, & she seemed to view me in particular as a threat to her self-imposed authority. It had previously been my opinion that a jury was made up of twelve unique and
equal individuals.
The first thing she declared was a vote as to who thought the defendant was guilty & who thought he was not guilty. I must explain we were by this point a jury of only eleven good men & true. This was because the case had over-run into a second week & one of the jurors had been dismissed as he was going on holiday. We were asked to put our hands in the air if we believed that the defendant was guilty. Along with four other jurors I put my hand in the air as I believed the defendant to be guilty. The foreman then declared, "five people think he’s guilty & six people think he’s innocent". I pointed out that we had not yet had a vote for not guilty & that some people may well be undecided at this point, as we were yet to deliberate on the evidence we had heard. She agreed on a vote for a not guilty verdict to which she promptly wrote down that six people voted not guilty before I had the chance to count any hands.
The deliberation struggled on for about an hour with one person rightly deciding that she must change her verdict of guilty to not guilty as she had reasonable doubt. We then proceeded to take one of our first detours from deliberating about the evidence in the case by discussing what 'Reasonable Doubt' meant. Apparently, I had been mistaken in my understanding of the term 'Reasonable Doubt', which was that reasonable doubt is a doubt based on reason and common sense after a careful and impartial consideration of all the evidence in the case. But, no! In fact, after much deliberating I eventually had to concede that 'Reasonable Doubt' meant that you must be 100% certain that the defendant was guilty. Even though to be 100% certain, surely you would have to have witnessed every event applying to the case with your own eyes! Otherwise, how can you be 100% certain which side is telling you the truth? Therefore, if you had to be 100% certain, surely no defendant could ever be found guilty!
So, after redefining the term 'Reasonable Doubt', the not-guilty group of jurors decided to take another vote as to who now felt that the defendant was guilty, or not guilty. This was perhaps my first real indication that I was part of a jury of which I had 'Reasonable Doubt' of its ability to safely come to a decision as to whether the defendant was guilty or not guilty. So I protested that no one could have changed their opinion because we hadn’t really discussed the evidence. Then, I turned to a young man who had not joined us around the table but instead sat in the windowsill staring out for the past hour. He had contributed nothing to the deliberation & so I decided to get him involved by asking him whether he had changed his opinion, to which he replied questioningly, "what?". I asked him, "did you vote guilty or not guilty in the first vote?". I was trying to keep it simple, this kid was quite clearly not the quickest runner out of the starting block. This time he replied, "I didn’t vote. I wasn’t listening". Fine. But how the hell had the foreman, who counted the votes, managed to get five guilty verdicts & six not guilty verdicts when one juror openly admitted to not voting? I soon realised that this jury not only had a disregard for the evidence but also that they were prepared to manipulate the votes in favour of their own opinion.
More deliberating continued during which I explained how I could be ‘100% certain’ that the defendant was guilty. I explained how I had come to my conclusion based on the evidence I had seen & heard to which one woman, who thought the defendant was not guilty, stated: "you don’t understand women". At first I didn’t understand her comment, thinking that she meant I didn’t understand what she was saying to me. But then I realised she meant that I had believed the victim’s evidence because I didn’t understand women & that I therefore couldn’t see that the victim was lying when she gave her evidence. To this, I restated the fact that I was basing my opinion on the evidence & that if it had been a man giving the same evidence in exactly the same way (taking into account a few factual differences between a woman being raped & a man being raped) then I would have come to exactly the same verdict. To this, she replied: "if it had been a man giving the evidence, I would have believed the defendant was guilty as well". What she was saying was that she wasn’t basing her opinion on the evidence, but on a prejudice against the victim, that she was a woman & therefore her evidence could not be believed. Apparently, only if a man had made such allegations would she ever believe the evidence!
The deliberating continued… No one changed their minds. Why would they? We weren’t discussing the evidence; we were more concerned with changing the meaning of 'Reasonable Doubt' in order to suit our own ends. At one point four women on the jury were discussing whether or not the defendant (a self confessed paedophile) would have been handsome & good looking twenty years ago! At this point I must point out that the defendant was 55 years old & that the alleged offences took place nearly 20 years ago. They went on to say that as the defendant stood face on to the jury in the witness box, it was difficult to tell, but that when he was in the dock where it was possible to observe him in profile, you could see that he might have been very good looking 20 years ago! They then proceeded to say how good looking the defence barrister was. It was turning into a popularity contest where the good looking men should be believed based on attractiveness alone, but where threateningly beautiful girls must have been asking for it!
Eventually, the jurors who believed he was not guilty decided that we should have yet another vote. This time though, we must state not only whether we think the defendant is guilty or not guilty, but we also had to state on a scale of 1 to 10 precisely
how guilty we thought he was! Again, it was left to me to point out that about 2 hours previously we had all agreed that if we believed the defendant to be guilty we must be 100% certain. Therefore, if we say he’s guilty we must by default say '10' as that is 100% on such a scale. Otherwise, you must find the defendant not guilty. Thus, why do we need a scale of 1 to 10? He’s either guilty ('100% certain') or he’s not guilty. It took me about 15 minutes to get the other jurors to understand that! Their attempt to redefine the term 'Reasonable Doubt' had backfired on them so that this jury - me included - was undeniably unsound, inconsistent, & unable to safely come to a unanimous, or even a majority verdict.
The whole experience has left me with a sour taste in my mouth, a mistrust of the United Kingdom’s judicial system, & has furthered my belief that rather than people becoming more educated & aware, human beings are no further forward with their justice system than when it was accepted that to prove a person’s innocence of witchcraft you must drown them… Yes, kangaroo courts are still the order of the day!
"My friends, it is not John Harrison Peabody who is on trial here today but the fair name of British justice" – Tony Hancock (from Twelve Angry Men)All characters and events in the above blog are fictitious and any resemblance in whole or in part to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
