Good men and true
In most discussions of criminal justice, to say that ‘too many get off’ is to express an opinion about lucky defendants. But that same assertion could with equal force be applied to potential jurors.
Lawyers, priests and prison medical officers aren’t allowed to serve on juries. Nurses needn’t bother. Vets, chemists, and members of the armed forces can be excused if they wish. MPs generally prefer not to, thanks all the same. In fact, you’d have to be mad to do jury service. And if you’re mad, then you too are exempt.
Since National Service was scrapped 40-odd years ago, serving on a jury has been the sole civic duty expected of Her Majesty’s subjects. But these days, it seems, the only people who undertake this tedious task-apart from a scattering of dutiful idealists-are the ones who can’t think of an excuse to get them off. Which, considering the options available, does not say a lot for their brainpower.
In recent times, the British public has been vastly entertained by tales of daft juries. In 1994, a jury attempted to contact dead murder victims with an ouija board. Two years later, a jury sent notes to the judge complaining about each other, and requesting a hotel with a gym-then, perhaps not altogether surprisingly, failed to reach a verdict. And earlier this month, a juror with astrological powers was dismissed from a case in Newcastle Crown Court after asking for the precise time and date of the defendant’s birth.
But to Trevor Grove, such stories are little more than black propaganda. Grove, a former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, recently served on a jury in one of the most important cases-murder excepted-of the 1990s; and the experience has left him a passionate supporter of the system. In vigorous, journalistic prose, he has woven a forceful defence of juries together with an account, by turns amusing and disturbing, of the case in which as foreman he was eventually to deliver the verdict. (As though to drive home the notion that this is a book with compelling narrative, Bloomsbury has commissioned a jacket design by the man behind Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.)
The story begins at the end of 1996, at the Old Bailey, where Grove is assigned to a long case, the kidnapping of a Greek shipping tycoon. Over a period of five months, the prosecution attempts to persuade Grove and his colleagues of the guilt of four men arrested in charge of the victim; while the defence argues that the entire episode was a hoax, masterminded by the victim himself-a man well known to London casinos-to extort money from his family.
Grove’s portraits of the protagonists are vivid, and frequently amusing. A pompous barrister, surely the last man in England to wear a bowler hat (on a visit to the scene of the crime), is eventually sacked by his client; the judge, whose patience appears to be endless, eventually gets a chance to let off some steam; and a Greek defendant conducts his own case-including self-examination-with what can only be described as a resourceful approach to the English language. Any journalist who reads the book is bound to envy Grove for having such excellent material placed in his lap.
But to be fair, he did put the work in. Serving on a jury, as Grove makes perfectly clear, can be grim. When it doesn’t bore you rigid, it makes your hair stand on end. Ordinary people might reasonably balk at handling murder weapons, or examining photos of dead children and mutilated women, but jurors have no choice in the matter. As for reaching a verdict-well, that distressing task has sometimes been enough to make some jurors physically sick.
In addition to serving his time in court, Grove has carried out plenty of research. He provides helpful comparisons with the American system, a range of opinions from barristers and the judiciary, and sketches from judicial history. Particularly impressive were the jurors who followed their conscience-rather than the law-by refusing to convict the Quaker William Penn in 1670. Their precedent was followed in the 1985 trial of civil servant Clive Ponting for a breach of the Official Secrets Act. He might have done it, but the jury supported him.
But the role of the jury is slowly diminishing. Juries were long ago dispensed with in civil cases, apart from libel. They’re rarely used in Coroner’s Courts. Barely 7 per cent of criminal cases are passed up by magistrates for trial by jury-and of those, more than half don’t reach trial because defendants plead guilty at the last moment. And the government has hinted that juries will soon be removed from complex fraud trials. But for the time being, notes Grove with satisfaction, no judge can put someone behind bars for more than six months-unless the defendant’s fellow-citizens have found him or her guilty.
1 June 98