Courts & juries Flashcards
Magistrates’ court
Court of first instance for all crimes
Deal with 98% of crime
Hear all summary cases and some indictable cases
Approximately 50 stipendiary magistrates, who hear cases on their own
Maximum sentence is six months imprisonment
Responsible for the bulk of hospital orders
‘There is no such thing as fair trial in front of a magistrate.’
The Criminal Justice System must be fair.
It is based on the principle that the guilty must be convicted and the innocent acquitted. This requires:
Good investigation
Accurate charging
Effective Prosecutions
Robust case management and
Effective defence services.
Criminological studies that revealed about the operation of justice in magistrates’ courts
Hucklesby and Marshall (2000) indicates that 10-17 percent of all persons released on bail commit an offence while at liberty.
Clearly magistrates have inadequate information on which to make confidence decision, yet the stakes are high.
Offending on bail is undesirable; yet so, in a supposedly due process-based system, is pre-trial imprisonment of innocent people and minor offenders.
Magistrates seem to cope by over-using conditions when they do grant bail and by developing an ‘unquestioning culture’ whereby information from the Crime Prosecution Services is seen as factual but information form the defence is seen as partial.
This is a problem in relation to all magistrates’ decisions, such as applications for search warrants (Sander et al., 2000: ch. 6).
Magistrates even sometimes refer to prosecutors as ‘our solicitor’ (Hucklesby, 1996: 218-19, 224).
The Jury systems is the ‘lamp that shows that freedom lives’
Lord Devlin (1956) observed ‘that trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.’
The system of trial by judge is of constitutional significance. The jury is also, through its collective decision-making, an excellent fact finder. Not surprisingly, the public trust juries.
