A Verdict On Which You Are All Agreed?

JURIES HAVE come in for quite a bashing in recent years; certainly in the UK, there have been calls for a revision of the jury system, replacing the traditional jury with a group of relevant experts. Who better to judge, say, complex financial crimes, the argument goes, than a jury of finance professionals. After all, they go on to say, the barristers don't have to waste valuable time explaining the basics of whatever process has been flouted for the benefit of the alleged criminal.

Oh but yes they do, and that's the point. Explaining your case to someone completely ignorant of the subject forces you back to basics; it makes you start at the beginning and build your argument from scratch. No flim-flam, no short cuts. And no taking anything for granted. That's the way it should be: a strong argument, with solid foundations, built from the bottom up.

Critics of the conventional system also claim that many jurors don't pull their weight; they're along for the ride, they say. A columnist in a popular tabloid newspaper claimed that those who got involved in jury duty were either too stupid or too idle to avoid it.

Some years ago, I was called for jury duty, and my experience was quite different. While the usual commitment is for a ten day period, a number of longer trials were scheduled for around that time, and I was selected as a juror for one estimated to last for three or four months.

In the end, I spent five months attending court with eleven other people, most of whom I would otherwise have had little in common with. We turned up every day, sometimes to spend a full day listening to evidence, other days to be sent away as legal argument took place. I took a lot of notes, as did a few of the others. Sometimes I wondered about an 'imbalance of attention', as I saw some of us staring into the courtroom distractedly during much of the proceedings.

And yet, when the time came for us as a jury to deliberate and reach a verdict, every single member of the jury had something important to contribute. Those of us that took notes could recall what had been said, but those who seemed to be paying less attention during the trial were in fact the keenest observers of body language, of intonation and of how witnesses and defendants came across. While we had our heads in our notes, they were studying the people in front of them and forming opinions which later proved to be invaluable.

So, does the jury system need replacing? No it does not.