Clause 36 - Trials on indictment without a jury
Criminal Justice Bill
2:45 pm
Mr Mark Simmonds (Boston and Skegness, Conservative)
It is a pleasure to make my first proper contribution to the Committee, and I do so with some trepidation, having seen the tremendous experience and expertise ranged on both sides. I have not practised or studied law in any detail, so I hope that the Committee will be gentle with me.
Some serious issues are at stake in the clause. I agree with other hon. Members that it will undermine the criminal justice system and the public's confidence in it—and it may at times bring it into severe and
serious disrepute. As an outsider, I take note of what the experts say. It is pertinent that the Law Society and the Bar Council are unequivocally opposed to the clause.
I do not wish to repeat what has been said, but my hon. Friend the Member for Woking and the hon. and learned Member for Redcar (Vera Baird) both said that it is potentially a slippery slope and that we are only one small step away from the rights of the defendant being taken away. It will be much more difficult to explain what I would call bizarre, unusual and unexpected decisions. The public accept that such decisions occur occasionally—there are 12 minds working on a case in a jury trial—but if there is only one judge, he could appear tainted. At best, it could seem that the old boy network was at work; at worst, there could be a perception of corruption.
I do not suggest that our judiciary are susceptible to corruption: I am talking about the public's perception. We shall deal with that in a little more detail when we come to clauses 38 to 40, on jury tampering, but I suspect that one individual is far more easily got at than 12.
I reiterate what I said when intervening on the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes). The public have tremendous confidence in the split between the Executive and the judiciary. There have been times when ''pressure'' has been brought to bear—I am going back a long way, for example to the train robbers, when political influence was supposedly brought to bear to ensure a conviction. I would not want the public to have the perception that judges could be politically influenced, but there is no chance of that happening with the jury system. I am afraid that it might happen if we go down this route.
The hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey said that jurors have a far greater breadth of experience and knowledge of life and come from a far greater spectrum of the community than one judge could. Judges inevitably come from a white, male, middle-class background; jurors obviously do not. There is also a greater propensity for jurors to come from a wider area of the community, and they will have a greater dispersal of prejudice. Again, a judge is inevitably going to have some prejudices, and that may influence some decisions.
I have great fears—I shall go into them in more depth when we reach clause 37—about the pressure applied to judges, particularly by the media in high-profile cases because a celebrity has been mentioned. The judge could end up being the person on trial: his background and that of his family could be explored. That might also touch on the point about the judge having prejudicial views that might influence his decision. Those are my fundamental concerns about the clause.