Sir, Iain MacMaster (letter, June 27) makes the point that “if a criminal trial is not prejudiced by dispensing with a jury” then “one wonders why we bother with trial by jury in the first place”. Why bother indeed?

On the face of it, a trial by the much quoted “jury of my peers” seems attractive. It has a cosy, decent, democratic and fair ring to it. I regret to say that, apart from that, there is precious little to recommend trial by jury.

Anyone who has experience of Crown Courts (let us not forget that the vast majority of all criminal trials are conducted in the magistrates’ courts without a jury) will know that the people who know the least at a trial are the jury. The evidence put to them is censored, controlled, delivered after frequent and unwelcome interruptions and often without being understood. Those with most knowledge of the case — defendants, the judge, lawyers and police — can only hope that from this the jury come to a sensible verdict.

And it is that coming to a sensible verdict that is the central issue. No one outside the jury room has any idea how the verdict has been reached. We have no idea if the verdict was reached by sensible analysis of the evidence by a group of intelligent people bringing their individual and collective experience of life to bear, or by a mixture of guesswork, assumption, stupidity or prejudice. That is not to say that juries are any of the above; we simply do not know.

Wherever a trial is conducted by a judge alone, as in the Diplock trials of Northern Ireland, a detailed judgment is produced, explaining the rationale behind the decision. We are informed, for example, that “Witness X gave impressive and persuasive evidence, being absolutely certain of what he saw” and “Witness Y seemed unsure of his evidence, and could not remember key elements of their account” and so on. This seems to be a far more transparent and logical method of justifying decisions of whether to convict or acquit. To this must be added the observation that whereas a jury might be fooled by a lawyer with a specific agenda, a judge (or judges) will be much better at assessing witnesses and evidence.

Consider the case of Colin Stagg. It was not a jury that acquitted him; it was a judge who ruled quite correctly that the evidence of the police was completely unacceptable and threw the case out (“Judge attacks police over ‘murder trap’, Sept 15, 1994). Would a jury have done the same? And whatever a jury’s verdict, how could we have been sure that it was right?

Notwithstanding a cosy and historically right “feel” to a jury trial, if I were an innocent man, I would rather have a learned judge consider the case against me. If I knew I was guilty, however, then I daresay I would want to “take my chances” with a jury.

Andrew Clark

Beckenham, Kent

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