eurealist.co.uk

Simon Jenkins is again having a go at Trial by jury in the Times today he says;

Jury trial has outlived its usefulness. To pretend that it delivers justice is absurd. This archaic theme park democracy is expensive, a waste of time and adds nothing to fair trial. Abolish it.

He cites as evidence for this call to abolish Trial by Jury two recent cases which have not gone the way he thinks proper;

Of the Abu Hamza trial he says;

In the first the trial of a man now known to have been a serious public menace was delayed for four years because the Crown Prosecution Service felt that the evidence of the police and MI5 was insufficient to get a jury conviction. And the Sion Jenkins case, here Simon Jenkins (no relation I assume) says After nine years, three trials, 700 witness statements and £10m in costs, the judicial system still cannot decide whether Jenkins killed his foster daughter, Billie-Jo.

Jenkins assumes that was why the CPS did not prosecute Abu Hamza, but it could equally have been because this Labour Government relies on a great many Muslim votes to keep them in office, and did not want to unset the apple cart.

Even if we accept Jenkins superstition, which is difficult even in his own terms, because he say now known to have been a serious public menace in other words that accusation has been tested in court, before then it was only an assumption.

In any event what is the alternative? That people be convicted without evidence or with a lower standard of evidence. And whose fault is it in the Jenkins case, if the prosecution cannot find the evidence to convince a jury, then obviously the evidence is lacking, here again Jenkins seems to be calling for conviction on a lower standard of evidence.

He then goes on to say;

No sooner was the Jenkins jury released and the accused formally acquitted than Thursday`s newspapers were filled with evidence that the jury had not been allowed to hear although it had been heard previously by Court of Appeal judges. This evidence, of violent rages suffered at Jenkins hands by his former wife, had been banned from disclosure at the trial as prejudicial (a word seemingly synonymous with relevant). The impact was to make the jury appear a bunch of dupes.

This is not a condemnation of trial by jury but of the legal professions own rules, which deny the jury the full information, originally up until the 17th century the jury would have made their own investigations and would not have been mere pawns in the professional game, to be spoon fed only the information decided by the judge. However even on that point; the reports that Jenkins suffered violent rages is not proof in itself that he murdered his foster daughter.

The fact the Charles Clarke is going to present arguments for the government to have the power to lock up people without trial since courts are slow and jurors may not convict is not an argument against trial by jury, it is in fact the very reason we need trial by jury.

Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other — or at least no more accurate — definition of a despotism than this. Spooner.

Jenkins claims in a case last year, where he was a juror, that the Judge suggested that the jury must acquit someone he believed to have been guilty the drift of the judge`s summing up was to the effect that the jury could only acquit. But this is not possible the judge cannot instruct a jury to find either way, Such was the case in the 1670 political trial of William Penn, who was charged with preaching Quakerism to an unlawful assembly. Four of the twelve jurors voted to acquit  and continued to acquit even after being imprisoned and starved for four days. Under such duress, most jurors paid the fines. However, one juror, Edward Bushell, refused to pay and brought his case before the Court of Common Pleas. As a result, Chief Justice Vaughan issued an historically-important ruling: that jurors could not be punished for their verdicts. Bushell’s Case (1670) was one of the most important developments in the common-law history of the jury.

Of course this concept like all our defences against the state is now under attack from a government who would like to be the deciders of their own powers. Jenkins then is either a fool, or useful idiot working in the cause of those who would like establish authoritarianism in our courts.

Jenkins now goes on to offer more evidence for abolishing jury trial

“Juries try less than 2% of criminal cases. They are a judicial sideshow. Given the professed sanctity of the institution to lawyers it is a wonder that they accept the fairness of the remaining 98%.”

Well there is that point, why should any of us accept the fairness of a system which decided on the evidence alone, that is one of the major benefits of the jury system it make the ordinary man or woman in the street the final arbiters of our law;

“For more than six hundred years — that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 — there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.

Unless such be the right and duty of jurors, it is plain that, instead of juries being a “palladium of liberty” — a barrier against the tyranny and oppression of the government — they are really mere tools in its hands, for carrying into execution any injustice and oppression it may desire to have executed.” Spooner I think.

Thomas Jefferson stated: “I consider trial by jury as the only action ever yet conceived by man by which a government can be held accountable to the to the principles of the constitution.”

Jenkins; “Research suggests that 90% of those electing to go for jury trial are guilty and are merely seeking delay or putting their faith in the ever-rising jury acquittal rate. The jury is presented, usually by those who have never sat on one, as a citizen’s last line of defence against an over-zealous state. It is mostly a villain’s last throw against conviction.”

They are not guilty unless they are fund to be by the jury, and it is up to the prosecution to prove that guilt. To dismiss one of our greatest freedoms from tyranny as a villain’s last throw against conviction is nonsense;

Removal from the jurors of their judgement on justice issues transforms Trial by Jury into the unlawful, one-sided, unfair mistrial-by-government-judges, the corrupt method by which tyrannies thrive.

This system enables and obliges judges to enforce every persecution, stealth-tax, oppression, money-motivated subterfuge and injustice government introduces, and which judges then lawlessly claim is “the law.” Democratic government generally attempts to enact legislation that is approved of by or is acceptable to the majority of the population. However, majority assent of itself does not invest legislation with legitimacy or virtue, regardless of its support, e.g. NAZI Race Laws. If Trial by Jury had been operating in the Third Reich, the NAZI tyranny would have been curtailed, perhaps then the Holocaust and the Second World War would have been averted.

Jenkins could not have been be more wrong if he tried when he says “Juries date from the days of trial by ordeal”, he is inverting historical facts, in order perhaps to use an oft (left wing) utilised method of argument; that is damming by association.

In 1219 Henry III, directed that this method of trial be abandoned in England after Pope Benedict III had condemned trial by ordeal in 1214. The jury trial was a replacement of the trial by ordeal and not a leftover from those days.

The fact is that for whatever reason Simon Jenkins does not like jury trials, and thinks them and archaic imposition on the power of the state. That they are an impediment to the power of the state, is a commendation for them and is the very reason we need to retain our rights to judge ourselves and to decide for ourselves, on the fairness of those laws our lords and masters in Whitehall, and increasingly in Brussels, wish to impose on us, because for as long as we have trial by jury we have the freedom to live by our own laws.

In his book Trial by Jury, published in 1956, Sir Patrick Devlin said:
For more than seven out of the eight centuries during which the judges of the
common law have administered justice in this country, trial by jury ensured that
Englishmen got the justice they liked and not the sort of justice that the
government or the lawyers or any body of experts thought was good for them.

Each jury is a little parliament. The jury sense is the parliamentary sense. I cannot
the see the one dying and the other surviving. The first object of any tyrant in
Whitehall would be to make parliament utterly subservient to his will; and the
next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for no tyrant could afford to leave a
subject’s freedom in the hands of twelve of his countrymen.

So that trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.

It is a lamp that Charles Clarke, Tony Blair and Simon Jenkins wish to put out, it will be our great loss as a freedom loving nation if we let them get their way.

Edit
I just have recived this from Dennid Cooper;

Having read this through twice, I can’t find a single good argument leading to his conclusion that jury trial should be abolished, so I’m left wondering whether he has some ulterior motive. Eg, MI5 didn’t want Abu Hamza prosecuted for other
reasons, not because the evidence wouldn’t convince a jury.

Clarke argues for locking people away without due process because that’s what he wants to do, not because juries won’t convict.

It wasn’t the jury who decided that they couldn’t hear some evidence presented in the Sion Jenkins appeal.

So on, all the way through, and often he contradicts his own
arguments. It’s .