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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

I think it most unlikely that it will make any difference at all. One of the Solicitor-General’s arguments for the Bill was that some cases collapsed after long periods without ever reaching a conclusion. That is absolutely true, but jurors have not had a role in it. In my experience—and I have some experience of fraud trials—such cases usually collapse because the prosecution case was poorly presented, failed to identify the key issues and presented far too much evidence. Cases are thrown out at half time on submissions of ““no case to answer””, without a jury ever considering a verdict. Unless by some extraordinary circumstance judges take a different view from the view that they would otherwise have taken at half time because they are sitting without a jury—and I hope that that is not the case, because they ought to be applying their minds in exactly the same fashion—I think the number of long fraud trials that collapse will be identical. There are new protocols, which we have discussed, there are directions from the Lord Chief Justice, and there is a new Fraud Act, the Fraud Act 2006. All those developments might well help. I hope very much that fewer fraud trials will collapse at half time, because I hope that cases will be dealt with better. I hope that the charges on the indictment will be right, and that fewer prosecutions will be brought in cases in which manifestly the wrong charge has been brought or no charge should have been brought at all; but I do not think that juries are the key to such improvements.