Further Compounds The Inadequacy

Janet Eastham writes:

Sir Keir Starmer found that scrapping jury trials led to wrongful convictions in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Prime Minister concluded that removing juries from Troubles-era Crown Court trials meant cases were “failing to secure reliable convictions based on properly tested evidence”, according to a report uncovered by The Telegraph.

The findings threaten to undermine efforts, which are being spearheaded by David Lammy, to cut record court backlogs by curbing access to jury trials.

Mr Lammy, the Justice Secretary, has already been forced to guarantee a rebel Labour MP a place on the public bill committee to prevent dissenting members from voting against the reform en masse. The Government will be under pressure to make further concessions to secure its passage.

Earlier this year, the Prime Minister insisted that cutting jury trials was a “fundamental argument of principle” to deliver justice to victims.

However, The Telegraph has uncovered a report he helped write in 1992 that found scrapping juries “enables wrongful convictions to occur in the absence of any procedural or judicial error”.

We formed the view that the issue with regard to the Diplock Courts is not miscarriage of justice; but that the Northern Ireland [Emergency Provisions] Act does not provide for adequate “carriage” of justice in the first place. The state of the law is such that it enables wrongful convictions to occur in the absence of any procedural or judicial error. The Diplock Courts are failing to secure reliable convictions based on properly tested evidence.

Nick Timothy MP, the shadow justice secretary, said that the Prime Minister “should read the report he helped craft and stop his attack on jury trials”.

He continued: “The report contains many of the arguments that critics in Parliament and in the legal profession have made against the bill. Judge-only trials remove vital protections from defendants and place additional burdens and scrutiny on judges.”

In 1991, Sir Keir organised a delegation of lawyers to Belfast to inspect the court system.

In a report published the following year, they concluded that Diplock courts, introduced to try serious and terrorism-related crimes without juries, reduced opportunity for cross-examination.

Sir Keir and his colleagues concluded that scrapping juries meant it was “more difficult to raise a reasonable doubt”, with conviction almost a foregone conclusion.

They described the process as “bordering on ‘conveyor-belt’ justice”.

The central feature is of course the absence of the jury. It cannot too often be reiterated that its abolition in the North of Ireland marked a radical departure from an entrenched legal tradition, which provided the cornerstone of the modern law of evidence and trial procedure and is an important right and obligation in a democratic society.

The report found a “telescoping of the whole trial process”, with cases “increasingly tried on the papers”, meaning court decisions were solely made based on written evidence without any oral hearings.

Sir Keir and his colleagues concluded: “The examination and cross-examination will be reduced, questioning cut, that the issues will not be so well rehearsed or argued as would be required in front of a jury, nor will witnesses be so vigorously tested or their credibility so thoroughly assessed and, in short, the challenging role of the defence is significantly curtailed.”

They added: “Under such circumstances, it would appear to be more difficult to raise a reasonable doubt.”

The authors noted an unusually high conviction rate of more than 90 per cent in Diplock courts.

They argued that removing juries collapsed the roles of fact-finder and arbiter of law in a way that made it harder, if not impossible, for evidence to be properly tested.

The absence of the jury further compounds the inadequacy of the court to test confession evidence. The separation of the tribunal of fact and law, ordinarily provides the framework for weighing of evidence by the jury, with the judge ensuring legal and procedural adherence to the framework. This is of course an essential safeguard for limiting the influence of subjective factors on findings of fact and is clearly absent in the Diplock Court, where the judges detachment and objectivity is compromised by the constant exposure to cases of a similar nature, the phenomenon known as case-hardening.

Under Mr Lammy’s proposed legislation to help clear the backlog of 80,000 court cases, juries will only decide upon cases of murder, rape, manslaughter and other serious offences carrying sentences of more than five years.

The Courts and Tribunals Bill prompted a rebellion among Labour MPs this week, forcing Mr Lammy to offer a rebel MP a seat on the public committee for the Courts and Tribunals Bill.

The concession briefly quelled the revolt and the bill cleared its first Commons hurdle on Tuesday. The bill is expected to return to the Commons on May 15.

Only 10 Labour MPs voted against the bill, but 90 did not vote, although some will have been given permission to miss the vote.

Karl Turner, the Labour MP leading efforts to halt the reforms, told The Telegraph that most of the 67 MPs he knew were prepared to vote against the bill at Second Reading agreed instead to abstain once the concession was secured.

Mr Turner said Sir Keir’s Diplock courts report found that removing jury trials led to “a clear injustice”.

“Like David Lammy, the Prime Minister knows full well that doing away with jury trials in serious criminal cases, that affords the guilty three years’ incarceration, is unjust, unworkable, unpopular and unnecessary,” he said.

“The tragedy is that Keir Starmer as Prime Minister knows the cost of jury trials but he is prepared to ignore the value of this 800-year-old right of those accused and prosecuted by the state.”

Membership of the public bill committee is expected to be announced next week, with the first oral evidence session set for March 25.

A government spokesman said: “We must recognise that our justice system has changed – technology means there is more evidence than ever before, and trials for more complex cases, such as those involving sex offences or online fraud, are taking longer to go in front of a jury.

“Our changes will prioritise jury trials for the most serious cases, helping victims get fairer and faster justice.”