Lay Participation in the English Legal System is no longer either necessary or desirable. Discuss.
Laypersons are members of the public. They are legally unqualified personnel, making decisions on individuals’ guilt or innocence. Their participation in the criminal system is based on the principle that an accused should be judge by his peers (his equals). Such laypersons are either members of the jury or magistrates. They are not paid for their involvement but do receive expenses and a contribution to possible loss of earnings if appropriate. Some may say, therefore, it is cheap justice and perhaps potentially dangerous to leave such important decisions that may affect people lives to members of the public, some of whom may not fully understand the law and what is being argued. However, others say that it is the crux of British justice, ‘Hallowed by time’ and essential to the system of criminal trials.
Members of the jury serve both advantages and disadvantages. Arguments that favour the jury system are Public participation, Certainty, Secrecy and Ability to judge according to conscience. In Public Participation juries allow the ordinary citizen to take part in the administration of justice, so that verdicts are seen to be those of society rather than of the judicial system, and satisfy the constitutional tradition of the judgment by one’s peers. Lord Denning described jury service as giving ‘ordinary fold their finest lesson in citizenship’. The jury then adds certainty to the law, since it gives a general verdict which cannot give rise to misinterpretation. In a criminal case the jury simply states that the accused is guilty or not guilty, and gives no reasons. Consequently, the decision is not open to dispute. Secrecy ensures freedom of discussion in the jury room; protects jurors from outside influences and prevents reluctance to sit on juries. It further ensures finality of verdict regardless of whether popular or not.
An ability to judge according to conscience came from a major milestone in the history of the jury was in Bushell’s Case (1670). Before this, judges would try to bully juries into convicting the defendant, particularly where the crime had political overtones, but in Bushell’s Case it was established that the jury’s members were the sold judges of fact, with the right to give a verdict according to their conscience, and could not be penalized for taking a view of the facts opposed to that of the judge. The importance of this power now is that juries may acquit a defendant, even when the law demands a guilty verdict. Because juries have the ultimate right to find defendants innocent or guilty, they have been seen as a vital protection against oppressive or politically motivated prosecutions, and as a kind of safety value for those cases where the law demands a guilty verdict, nut genuine justice does not. For example, in the early nineteenth century, all felonies (a classification of crimes used at the time, marketing out those considered most serious) were in theory punishable by death. Theft or goods or money above the value of shilling was a felony, but juries were frequently reluctant to allow the death penalty to be imposed in what seemed to them trivial cases, so they would often find according to their consciences often concerning issues of political and moral controversy, such as R v Kronlid and Others (1996). The defendants were three women who broke into a British Aerospace factory and caused damage costing over £1.5 million to a Hawk fighter plane. The women admitted doing this, and left a video explaining their actions in the plane’s cockpit. But they claimed that they had a defence under Section 3. Of the Criminal Law Act 1967, which provides that it is lawful to commit a crime in order to prevent another (usually more serious) crime being committed, and that this may involve using ‘such force as is reasonable in all the circumstances’. The defendants pointed out that the plane was part of a consignment due to be sold to the Government of Indonesia, which was involved in oppressive measures against the population of East Timor, a region forcibly annexed by Indonesia in 1975. However, the prosecution gave evidence that the Indonesia Government had given assurances that the planes would not be used against the East Timorese, and the British Government had accepted this and granted an export license. Acquitting the women was therefore a citizen of the British Government’s position of the issue, as well as the actions of the Indonesian Government, and in the face of the clear evidence that they had caused the damages and were widely expected to be convicted. The jury found them all not guilty.
