Entirely a matter for you

"You are now to retire, as indeed should I, carefully to consider your verdict of Not Guilty." ... Reprise of the Peter Cook skit of the Jeremy Thorpe trial ... Entirely a Matter for You ... Evan Whitton, from Justinian's archive November 5, 2004 

Matt, the cartoonist in The Daily Telegraph (UK) is commenting here on a Home Office plan to allow jurors to hear of accuseds’ previous convictions. The minister, David Blunkett, said:

“These reforms put victims at the heart of the justice system. Trials should be a search for the truth and juries should be trusted with all the relevant evidence to help them to reach proper and fair decisions.”

Defence herpetoids will find those sentiments both quaint and chilling, and the cartoon raises an ancillary issue: should untrained judges be the 13th juror, as some trained judges are in Europe? Three classic cases:

Justice Sir Nigel Cyprian Bridge summed up for a conviction in the 1974 Birmingham Six case. Mike Mansfield QC noted his technique in Presumed Guilty: The British Legal System Exposed (Heinemann, 1993):

“In a careful, almost total demolition of every defence witness and the lauding, sometimes verging on deification, of prosecution witnesses, the jury was corralled into the guilty pen as though driven by a diligent sheep-dog.”

The appeal court found in 1991 that Lord (as he had since become) Bridge was disastrously wrong.

In June 1979, Justice Sir Joseph Cantley summed-up for an acquittal in a case in which the Rt Hon Jeremy Thorpe was accused of being involved in a conspiracy to have Andrew Gino Newton murder Thorpe’s former lover, Norman Scott. Peter Bessell was the chief prosecution witness.

A few days later, Peter Cook, who said, “I could have been a judge, but I never had the Latin”, impersonated the judge at the Secret Policeman’s Ball for Amnesty International. He called the sketch Entirely a Matter for You, which is judgespeak for “entirely a matter for yours truly”.

“We have heard for example from a Mr Bex Bissell, a man who by his own admission is a liar, a humbug, a hypocrite, a vagabond, a loathsome spotted reptile and a self-confessed chicken-strangler. You may choose if you wish to believe the transparent tissue of odious lies which streamed on and on from his disgusting, reedy, slavering lips. That is entirely a matter for you ...

We have been forced to listen to the whinings of Mr Norman St John Scott, a scrounger, a parasite, a pervert, a worm, a self-confessed player of the pink oboe, a man, who by his own admission, chews pillows ...

The so-called hitman, Mr Olivia Newton John, is a piece of slimy refuse, unable to carry out the simplest murder plot ...

You are now to retire, as indeed should I, carefully to consider your verdict of Not Guilty.”

The jurors had taken Sir Joseph’s advice; he did not take Cook’s. 

In a 1987 libel case, that lying rodent, Jeffrey Archer, falsely denied that he had resorted to a dwarfish prostitute, Monica Coghlan. Summing-up, Justice Sir Bernard Caulfield seemed entranced by the icy charm of Mrs Mary Archer:

“Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? Has she been able to enjoy rather than endure her husband Jeffrey? Is she right when she says to you – you may think with delicacy - Jeffrey and I lead a full life? Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel?”

Mary Archer: fragrant

The jury gave Archer £500,000, and Bernie added on costs of £700,000. In 2001, Lord (as he now was) Archer got four years for perjury at the trial.

An aspect of the kelpie approach, which lorn-order politicians may find curious, is that judges are said to understand that 99 percent of accused are guilty, but when sitting alone they hide heaps of damning evidence from themselves, and then give 74 percent the benefit of a doubt. Or so it seems from an alarming statistic in The Australian of August 27, 1994:

“Figures from the NSW District Court show that the jury convicted in half the cases while the judge, when hearing a case alone, convicted in only a quarter.”

That is really nice for criminals and their herpetoids, less so for victims and long-suffering citizens who pay judges’ wages.

And if judges are wrong twice as often as jurors, it follows that judges at jury trials would do well to keep their opinions to themselves, and that untrained appellate judges might think twice before second-guessing jurors.

The lorn-order chaps might also contemplate another curiosity: European judges and jurors sit together and hear all the evidence, and give only nine percent the benefit of the doubt.