Electors and jurors – Very private affairs

If you are already tired of the hustings, long before a General Election has been announced, thank your lucky stars our election campaigns are so short! Politicians have to remember that for most of the time, most of the people are not remotely interested in politics. As long as the economy is working in their favour and they are left to get on with their lives, over one third of the people will not even bother to vote.

Many of us are politically committed – but we will never know why most people vote the way they do. Even if we knew which way someone had voted, we would not know why. Such is the virtue and the power of the secret ballot.

Similarly, no-one knows what makes the jurors in a court case deliver a verdict – which is sometimes overturned on appeal. I wonder if you have enjoyed as much as I have the TV series ‘Judge John Deed’? No doubt it has irritated some lawyers, but it has stripped away some of the mumbo-jumbo and revealed to many some of the rules and conventions that make our criminal justice system work.

Last year the then Home Secretary announced he would privatise the Forensic Science Service. Now, that is not what another favourite TV drama was about! In ‘Silent Witness’, the engaging Amanda Burton played a pathologist – but the science behind the story is similar. The Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, on which I serve, swiftly announced an Inquiry. Within weeks the Home Office had backed off privatisation!

Amongst the witnesses to give evidence to us recently were two advisers to the Crown Prosecution Service, a barrister and a Crown Court Judge. We discussed the role of expert witnesses – and what happens when they stray beyond their expertise. I recalled that during the notorious cases of Sally Clarke and Angela Cannings, a senior police officer had said to me that the death of one baby might be just one of those things – but two? “It stands to reason”, he said, that she must be guilty.

I asked our witnesses if it made any difference if policemen thought like that. The Judge responded by quoting a rape case where a policeman said to the defendant in interview, “There you are, million to one chance against it being anybody other than you”. The barrister continued, that the solicitor will say to the man, “come on now, you are bang to rights; it is DNA; you are guilty and if you plead guilty now we will get a bit knocked off, or we will probably get the offence brought down a bit – because plea bargaining goes on at police stations as well as elsewhere”. The Judge added, “People do, I am afraid, put their hands up to things they have not done”.

Our Report will probably say that the answer lies in more and better training in forensic science for barristers and judges, especially in digital technology and computing. If we are to have confidence in the verdicts of jurors, we must also have confidence in the competence of the judicial process.

Robert Key MP
February 2005