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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

I am one of the few non-legal minds contributing to the debate, so it could be said that I speak for the jury side of the equation, and for the common man, or the uninitiated. I rely simply on common sense. Trial by jury is a matter of fundamental principle that defines our national character and traditions of fairness. My story starts at Runnymede in 1215, when King John, who was about as popular then as the Prime Minister is now, was forced to adopt the Magna Carta, which became the keystone of what I believe is our constitution. Over the years, it has underpinned many legislatures around the world. It has helped to seed good governance and fair and transparent justice, and to prevent corruption in judicial systems. Even today, countries such as Iran can benefit from its guidance, at a time when the Prime Minister is trying to destroy it in this country. The Magna Carta is more than just history: it is alive and well today. It has led the world in developing principles of fair play and freedom, and getting right the balance of power and control between the state and the individual. It is also about ending the tyranny of the too often brutal power that the state sometimes exercises over its people. Now is no time to be dismantling such protection. Perhaps the most important provision of the Magna Carta was that it codified the existing and long-standing practices of trial by jury. Under habeas corpus, no person may be imprisoned or have his property confiscated without prior trial by his equals. That is a vital feature of the story of democratic development because it represents the first time that the authority of the state was ever specifically limited. It was the first step on the long road to what became universal enfranchisement. The principle of trial by jury of one’s peers, which was established in Magna Carta, was consolidated by the William and Mary declaration of rights of 1689. It continued the encoding of our constitution and the fundamental protections of the individual against the not unknown possibility of an overbearing state. The 1689 declaration stated:"““That Jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned.””" That is as relevant today to us as the American declaration of independence is to the American people. It is not some old archaic curiosity. I accept that it may sometimes appear attractive to dispense with inconvenient rights and principles that seem, on sloppy analysis, to stand in the way, but when those rights have been won through blood, sweat and tears over 850 years of history, and when they underpin our very freedoms, we dump them at our peril. The Government do not seem to have in their hearts a love or even a respect for our history and traditions. I sometimes doubt whether they value at all the fight led over centuries by this mother of Parliaments for freedom and human rights around the world. For the Prime Minister to start to destroy trial by jury, and drive home the thin end of what I will argue is a destructive wedge, would be an act of historic folly. That is not just incompetence or unknowing tort, but an act of vandalism—and for what purpose? What possible prize is to be won by that? How cheaply will the Government cast aside our historic freedoms? Incredibly, they will do so, they assert, simply to get easier, quicker or more certain convictions in a few serious fraud cases. Fraud is a property crime, which does not compare to crimes of violence, the abuse of children or terrorism. That only adds insult to the injury of this House, which has fought long and hard over centuries to win and then to protect the rights of the individual, of which trial by jury is one of the most important. Having set out the historic backdrop, let me turn to the contemporary and pragmatic arguments. The Bill is particularly invidious when we consider the existence of much better solutions to the problem of long and complex fraud trials. There is no evidence that juries prolong trials or that jurors are incapable of following the evidence in a fraud trial any more than in any other class of trial. Jurors have generally done a good job over hundreds of years and thousands of trials. They have secured and maintained high levels of public confidence in the judicial system. A panel of 12 independent members of the public has generally managed to grasp the essential issues of innocence or guilt, even when the legal issues are complex. The lawyers can argue the legal machinations. If they make the effort, they can put the issues across coherently to a jury. That is important in itself, to ensure that justice can be seen to be done by ordinary people, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) explained to the House. Barristers are clever and decent people—we all know that, because the House is full of them. Fraud trials are special in that they often pivot on the question of whether the defendant has acted dishonestly. The technical legal test for dishonesty centres on what an ordinary citizen perceives to be dishonest. It is not just an optional extra in fraud to have ordinary citizens sitting in judgment. It is absolutely essential that ordinary, independent people decide on the matter of dishonesty in fraud cases. Judges have a sophisticated and intimate knowledge of the process of law, but, with respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) who spoke earlier, that necessary strength in a judge may get in the way of the more detached, ordinary and independent insight of a group of 12 fair-minded members of the public applying their experience and common sense in a collective manner to the issues that they are considering. The jury sees the issues from a totally different perspective from that of the judge. Neither perspective is better than the other. My contention is that both perspectives are essential, valuable and indispensable parts of the whole system. It is not obvious why the Government have resurrected this ill-considered measure. A number of my colleagues have speculated on why they might have done so. It is not obvious, because there is no public demand for it. People do not stay late at the ““Hoy and Helmet”” pub in Benfleet to argue the case for the Bill to be brought forward. One of the benefits of jury trials is that they underpin the renowned incorruptibility of judges, which relies, at least in part, on the checks and balances of the jury system, as the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) pointed out earlier. There would be significant procedural and safety issues, because judges see and hear evidence and submissions during a trial that are rightly kept from juries because they might improperly influence their verdict. I am thinking, for instance, of previous records and items that are ruled inadmissible. Just how that is to be handled has not been explained at all by those on the Government Front Bench. We are told that the measure would affect only 10 or 20 out of tens of thousands of jury trials. However, those few trials each year could well be the thin end of the wedge. Experience has taught us to distrust the Government, so their indication that the measure is just for serious fraud is pretty worthless. Trial without jury could be expanded to other types of crime. For instance, terrorist trials can be extraordinarily complex and lengthy—the stated problems that engendered the Bill—but the international consequences of terrorist trials without jury may be unhelpful in retaining the moral high ground and in securing hearts and minds in the battle for international and national security. Some would argue that corporate manslaughter demands specialist knowledge from jurors. We can also add to the list serious organised crime, corruption and conspiracy. The way in which the Bill is drafted suggests that its scope is intended to go much wider than a few serious fraud cases. A future Government, under pressure from hard cases, might find it irresistible to bring other types of crime into the provisions for trial without jury. We all know the axiom: hard cases make bad law. I do not accept that there is a unique problem with fraud trials. The Attorney-General told Parliament that fraud conviction rates were 70 per cent., compared with a general conviction rate of 75 per cent.—although the Solicitor-General pointed out earlier that in a restricted survey, he found that the conviction rate for serious fraud was 61 per cent. However, even that is a much better conviction rate than the miserable rates for some cases of rape or child abuse, so will the Solicitor-General be arguing that we abolish juries for those trials? If there is a serious problem with a few fraud cases each year, we could tackle it without destroying one of the key tenets of good governance and justice. The Crown Prosecution Service could manage cases better and set them out more effectively. It could present fewer and clearer issues that could be more quickly and easily explained and supported by evidence. We could hold a trial of specimen counts before a jury and put remaining counts to a judge alone to make cases more manageable. I do not subscribe to the Government’s implied ““stupid jury”” argument. Nevertheless, we could get more professional people on to juries by tightening up the jury exemption rules that some people use to avoid their public duty. We could give better support to juries during the process, without removing their duty to decide the matters in front of them. Many of those points were covered very well by the Wooler report. The Bill will create the concept of a first and second-class justice system, with white-collar crime treated differently from blue-collar crime. That will carry enormous risks for the justice system and would be likely to undermine public confidence. The Bill will move trials to the High Court instead of the Crown court. Sadly, I depart from our Front-Bench policy on this, although no doubt my Front-Bench colleagues will disabuse me of my thoughts later. I do not think that it is necessarily a good idea to put serious fraud into the civil rather than the criminal jurisdiction. That would"““compound the concern that the removal of a jury is likely to make serious fraud appear a regulatory rather than criminal affair.””" That is a quote from Liberty, which promotes civil liberties and human rights. The Solicitor-General seemed to contradict his own arguments at the start of the debate. He said that he thought that juries could not understand complex and long cases, but he also said—I quote him—that stupid juries are not a reason for the Bill. He said that over-long trials were a key reason for the Bill, but he also said that he had no plans at present to employ trials without jury in other equally long cases. His presentation was riddled with anomalies and contradictions.