Of Jurors, Part 2

It seems to be a curse of living in the modern age that, whilst pre-Twitter and Facebook, people might have had opinions on current affairs but you were unlikely to ever hear them, the advent of those two mediums mean that firstly people tend to share their opinions (whether sought or not), and increasingly believe that because they can share their opinions they are necessarily important or correct.

The irony of writing a blog is not lost on me.

Moving swiftly on, this opinion-creep appears to have started with those ghastly phone-ins on radio, which seem to appeal on the basis that they are cheap to produce. Viz the faux-sensationalism and mock empathy of the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2, or the thought process on 5 Live which means that rather than broadcasting live sport (which is still continuing) you can instead listen to armchair pundits ringing in to bemoan their team's tactics. Rather than being some form of thought-provoking, passionate debate, you essentially end up with a pair of idiots shouting each other down. 

The inspiration for this piece is the furore about the decision-making process (or lack thereof) of the jury in the Vicky Pryce case. The robing room abounded with theories about how the jury ended up in that particular mess this morning, the most popular being two competing views: Firstly there were one or two people that had fundamentally mis-understood the whole process, and, exasperated at having tried to explain it many many times, others decided to say, "Look, fine, we'll ask the Judge to explain it." The alternative view was that there had been one or two clever dicks on the jury who wanted to play Columbo, because either they'd been watching too much CSI Miami (whatever that is), or because they thought that they knew better than those silly lawyers and the Judge.

Either way, I am still a card-carrying advocate of the jury system for all its faults, if only for the moments of inadvertent comedy (and therefore blog content). A colleague was defending out in Grimsby, and when he came to deliver his closing submissions had had with him a videotape cassette. There had in fact been no video evidence in the case at all, so his opponent was interested to see what use would be made of it (as an old silk once said to me, "Props, dear boy. Props.")

Rising to his feet, my colleague brandished the videotape at the jury:

Counsel (Rhetorically): Now members of the jury, the prosecution have to make you sure of the defendant's guilt. If I was to tell you that I had on this videotape an exact recording of the events in question, then ask yourself would you want to view it? If your answer was to be yes, then you couldn't be said to be sure of what happened, could you? This videotape, would you want to see it?

Juror (emphatically): Yes please