I’ve given up trying to work out the golden thread, or any thread for that matter, running through Polly Toynbee comments in the Guardian.
Today inside her Trojan horse column , she’s weeping at the government’s failure to get through “its no juries in complex fraud trials business.”
The poor dear gets herself most awfully confused.
She whitters on about the difficulty juries have in staying the course in a long fraud trial. How jurors have difficulty in remembering the evidence they are presented with. Nonsense. Most of the evidence in these cases is on paper. No need to remember anything. And any judge likely to be in charge will sum up the evidence given orally and link it to the documents the jurors have.Things will go wrong. But they go wrong in all trials.
But what really gets m/s Toynbee’s hackles up is that some of these multi billion pound fraudsters are getting off with their thievery, while some poor sod goes down the stairs for nicking a box of pens from work. It would be too much to expect facts and figures, and her readers are not disappointed. There’s NO evidence to support this nonsense. Why? There’s no research into what goes on in the jury room. It’s illegal to ask a juror what thought processes led to the decision.
Clearly, the Maxwell case still rankles with her but it’s a pisspoor example Polly. This was as easier case for a jury to decide as one of shoplifting from Woolies. The juror’s simple decision was to put a cross in the box “were the Maxwell lads dishonest”? And the decision was clear, and from what I’ve seen of the evidence, a no –brainer.
Then off she goes to the US.
Blimey, she weeps, they don’t ‘arf get convictions over there. But hey, Polly ole girl do they have juries? Of course they do. And the idea of abolishing them simply does not arise.
I know Blair seems to have forgotten his law but Polly then gets her knickers in a twist, poor dear, about lenient sentences and juries. I cannot think of an offence in this arena that does not allow a judge to dole out to a convicted fraudster wearing his white collar, a large spoonful of porridge. Sentencing has nothing to do with a jury.
A couple of years ago I saw Vera Baird M.P. Q.C, in
Newcastle give a talk to local lawyers. One of the issues she raised was the abolition of jury trials. She
believed then that their abolition in fraud cases would be a precursor to their general
abolition; or at least allowing the court, not the defendant, to decide whether
the case should be tried in front of a jury. His right to elect would disappear. She took the view then that once the
serious fraud cases were tried without a jury, the principle of jury trial
would have taken such a battering it would be easy to move on to that next
stage. At a stroke, or perhaps three strikes, the government would save money
and increase conviction rates, impossible plums for any government not to pull
out of the judicial pie. Vera was right then.
It must gladden the hearts of all on Planet Blair to read this nonsense from m/s Toynbee.
