Clause 2
Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill
12:00 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General & Shadow Spokesman On Community Cohesion, Law Officers (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
Clause 2 seeks to amend Section 43 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to substitute for “Crown Court Judge” a “High Court Judge” conducting the trial.
I would not like the Bill to go through this Committee without the Solicitor-General explaining the Government’s reasoning in deciding to entrust these trials to High Court judges. My reason for saying this is that I noticed the Solicitor-General picking his words with some care in the course of the earlier debate about the extent to which the judiciary might support these proposals.
I am not in a position to conduct a survey of all Her Majesty’s judges, but I have yet to come across a single Crown court judge who did not consider, first, that jury trial was a perfectly satisfactory vehicle for dealing with long and complex fraud cases and, second, a Crown court Judge who did not think that the worst possible thing that could happen to him was to be asked to sit and try a fraud trial on his own. As I hinted in my earlier interventions in Committee, this is because there are all sorts of procedural problems surrounding such a trial process which judges—they have communicated with me informally about this in large numbers—consider to be massively unsatisfactory.
If a judge should express the view that they are sure a person is guilty in a complex criminal case that leads to a substantial period of imprisonment and should it subsequently transpire, whether through the appeal process or by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, that some further evidence comes to light which shows that the wretched defendant was in fact telling the total truth when he denied his criminality, this will have a serious adverse impact on the judge’s credibility and standing. This is almost inevitable, however good a judge is at carrying out his work. This highlights why involving the judiciary in factual decision making to a criminal standard of proof in serious cases is a very dangerous road to take.
The Government has taken the view that, in the circumstances, it should be High Court judges who should be carrying out this procedure and not Crown court judges. In fairness to the Government, that was a proposal that came from the Opposition Back Benches at the time of the 2003 Criminal Justice Act because it was suggested that High Court judges would be more familiar with the procedure of dealing with trials on their own than the average Crown court judge.
That in itself, however, does not fully explain the Government’s reasoning and therefore I would like to take the opportunity of probing so that we can have fully on the record why the Government have decided that this is the appropriate course of action to take. I think that would be very useful and I hope the Minister can enlighten the Committee on the matter.