Are juries fair? Ten years ago, at the end of the court day in the Bar Mess at the Old Bailey, Professor Cheryl Thomas delivered the results of a mega-study into jurors’ decision-making. When she came to the question of conviction rates at different court centres, laughter erupted: every barrister knows that juries at Snaresbrook Crown Court — drawn from Hackney, Dagenham, Chigwell — love to let the villains off, whereas a Kingston-upon-Thames tribunal — from places like Barnes, Richmond and Epsom — will rarely award a defendant anything other than a silver medal. Awareness of this phenomenon goes back at least to the 1980s, when it was raised in parliament by the MP for Ilford South.
Except, of course, it turned out to be nonsense: for 2006-2008, the conviction rates for Snaresbrook and Kingston were within 1% of each other, either side of the national average of 63.9%. I suspect that this did little to dent the audience’s confidence in one of the profession’s most dearly held beliefs: arch references to Kingston juries still abound in London’s robing rooms.
But this was not the only surprise Professor Thomas delivered. The evidence, which came from analysis of over half a million criminal charges as well as a randomised trial with real jurors, strongly supported the proposition that white juries do not discriminate against black defendants. Indeed, it even appeared that a white defendant accused of a racially motivated crime is more likely to be convicted by a white jury than by a racially mixed one.
Those findings do not, of course, call into question the unfairnesses suffered by the non-white population upstream of trial — if anything they could be said to emphasise them, given that non-white people are over-represented in prisons. But they did allay the fears expressed in the Auld report of 2001, which made a recommendation (not subsequently implemented) that “Provision should be made to enable ethnic minority representation on juries where race is likely to be relevant to an important issue in the case”. Whether the findings have entrenched themselves in the public consciousness more generally, however, is another matter.
Last month, Professor Thomas — now an honorary QC — published the results of a new study, commissioned by the senior judiciary to investigate “rape myths”. Her conclusions are thoroughly at odds with received wisdom.
The idea that many people — and therefore many jurors — hold seriously wayward beliefs about this uniquely enraging crime is not new, and has solidified in recent years. It first became common in the early 2000s for judges to warn juries to approach with caution defence counsel’s arguments about, for instance, a lack of physical violence, or a delay in making a report. Such warnings were swiftly approved by the Court of Appeal and found their way into the “Bench Book” — the judges’ bible of approved jury directions.
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