My jury service proved it to me: the system works

I was summoned for jury service nearly forty years ago. It promised to take two weeks of my life which I didn’t want to give up. But I was curious and decided it would be wrong to try to get myself excused on the spurious grounds that I was too busy at work, which seemed to be a common middle-class gambit at the time.

So I reported at Wood Green Crown Court on a Monday morning, and spent the first couple of days sitting around with more than a hundred others waiting to be called. As always in such situations, consolation is to be found with one’s fellow sufferers. One of these was an eminent architect at that time engaged in redesigning the Royal Opera House and the adjacent Floral Hall. I thought that would have given him a reasonable excuse to get out of jury service, but he felt it was his civic duty to obey the summons. He was a good and sensible man who was just the sort you would want on any jury you might find yourself up before.

Generally we waited all morning and were sent home at lunchtime when it would have been clear to the clerks of the court that we would not be needed that day. I was called probably on the Thursday to a jury trying a case of shop-lifting. I thought it absurd: why wasn’t this dealt with in a magistrate’s court? The reason, it turned out, was that the defendant, a working class girl in her early twenties, was insisting on her right to trial by jury of her peers.  This had obviously upset the judicial apple cart, and she had had to wait more than a year for her day in court before a fine, old-school judge, His Honour Judge Jarlath Finney, complete with tremendous mutton chop whiskers.

The court was told that she had been arrested in Marks & Spencer’s Wood Green with a friend of the same age, who had a small child in a pushchair, which allegedly had been a useful place to conceal stolen items. The pair had been challenged by store detectives who had called the police.  A rather dim rookie constable had responded and arrested the pair.  The other girl had been tried in the magistrate’s court, found guilty and fined £150.

The outline of the case was clear enough, but the actual evidence given in court was muddled and flimsy.  The policeman’s testimony was particularly poor: he found it difficult to read his own notes, though Judge Finney encouraged him and gave him plenty of time to gather his thoughts.

After an hour of this we trooped off to the jury room, where our first task was to pick the foreman. Being a middle-class journalist living in Hampstead, I big-headedly assumed that I would be chosen. Instead we settled on a Greek Cypriot greengrocer from Palmer’s Green, who turned out to be an excellent choice. He went round the table to gather initial feelings.  All but one of the jurors said that, though we thought the defendant was probably guilty of shoplifting, we simply could not convict on the evidence given that morning.

The exception was the sole female juror, who I’ll call Jane. She was of much the same age and background as the defendant, but unlike her Jane was a good girl, neatly dressed, respectable and proud of who she was. The defendant, she insisted, was an obvious “wrong ‘un”.  Jane had grown up around similar girls and knew the type. It was clear that the defendant was guilty, and she begged us not to fall for a sympathy vote.

Led by our foreman we all tried to explain to her why she was wrong to call for conviction in this case.  Although we didn’t browbeat her or raise our voices, the impasse lasted an hour or more. Jane stood her ground, until she suddenly burst into tears, and said:  “Alright, not guilty!”

Back we went to deliver our verdict.  The defendant was dismissed.  Then Judge Finney turned to us with a smile, and said:  “Ladies and gentlemen, it is not my practice to comment on jury verdicts, but I want you to know that in this case I believe you made the correct decision.”

The length of time we had taken over what might seem an open and shut case probably indicated to him the nature of our deliberations. I don’t know about the other jurors, but I felt a glow of pride: innocent until proven guilty, habeas corpus, all that. The discussion in the privacy of the jury room had shown that all of us understood and believed in these fundamental principles of English common law – even to the extent of letting an obvious wrong ‘un go free. I hope this hapless government does not do away with jury trials — even for relatively minor offences which may nevertheless matter a great deal to the defendant.

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