Radical action now
CPS inspector supports Leveson on juries but says we can’t afford to wait
The chief inspector of the Crown Prosecution Service has told the attorney general that victims of crime need action “now” if the criminal justice system is to deliver justice.
In his annual report published on Friday, Anthony Rogers said he was pleased to see that Sir Brian Leveson had been radical in the reforms he recommended this month to reduce the backlog of cases awaiting trial in the Crown Court. But, Rogers told Lord Hermer KC, “I fear that most of the changes Sir Brian suggests will take time to implement and, as such, this will not address the immediate issue — as backlogs continue to increase, as more cases are received than finalised.”
It’s understood that Rogers is suggesting, for example, that senior judges should give priority to the most serious cases when listing them for trial in the Crown Court. That’s done already but what Rogers has in mind is understood to be new fast-track lists running in parallel to cases that are already taking as long as four years to come to trial.
Rogers told Hermer that if Leveson’s recommendations were accepted by the justice secretary Shabana Mahmood “there may be some reduction in backlogs and delays”. But, he stressed, “the status quo, or vested interests of long-standing rights being espoused by some legal professionals, will have to be set aside”.
Expanding on these comments, the chief inspector sided with Leveson rather than with the Criminal Bar Association1 on whether defendants should no longer be tried by juries in cases that may be classified as less serious.
“The criminal justice system is in a state of national emergency and delays are unsustainable,” Rogers told me.
He continued:
Calls from the legal profession to maintain the status quo and throw more money at the problem are unhelpful.
They do nothing to solve the serious issues at hand. Everyone needs to recognise that if we don’t move to act now all will be lost. Holding on to long-established principles and resisting change and innovation will further diminish the system that so many rely on.
The world is a far different place post-austerity and Covid, and all actors in the criminal justice system — from government and judiciary to the bar — need to implement radical solutions today or our great legal system will no longer be the envy of the world.
Elsewhere in his report, the chief inspector said inspections of the Crown Prosecution Service had revealed a “concerning level” of geographical variation. Further work was being done in the hope of finding why the quality of decision-making was significantly worse in some parts of England and Wales than in others.
However, Rogers was pleased that the attorney general had secured £39m to help the Serious Fraud Office recruit staff who could deal effectively with the prosecutor’s disclosure obligations.
“We do not agree that trial by judge alone for fraud/complex cases, or by judge or district judge and two magistrates for all either-way offences… where the likely sentence is [up to] three years’ custody, is the best solution,” wrote Mary Prior KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, last week. “We do not consider that an election for trial should amount to no more than agreeing that a judge at the first hearing in the Crown Court will choose whether a person is tried by a jury or a judge and two magistrates.”
Sorry: my finger slipped!
the inability or disinclination of so many Justice Secretaries to take on the Treasury and Cabinet on behalf of the long established Cinderella Service of the CJS, always a handy Aunt Sally when times are hard.
As Joni Mitchell sang (“Big Yellow Taxi”) “ You don’t know what you’ve lost ‘til it’s gone…….”
I find the description “vested interests” gratuitous, unhelpful and bordering on the insulting.
I dare say that there is much to ponder and indeed to agonise over for the CPS in the Chief Inspector’s Report and, of course, ameliorating efforts will require more sophistication than the mere “throwing of more money” at the shortcomings identified but if we are truly serious about achieving something less akin to re-arranging the deck chairs, then other moving parts of the system need to look at the planks in their eyes.
As I suspect, as a prime example, the Treasury continues to have an unhelpfully constraining role in restricting sitting days that, in its inhibiting effect on disposals, would if still in place largely negate any measures less offensive to IT than disenabling to the already stressed regular scapegoats of both branches of my profession and of course-always the ready to hand whipping boy of choice of the legal defence community.
Michael Mansfield, as I fear, has it right when he points to the likely candidates/“victims” for removal of the right to jury trial including those under the establishment microscope for what they would contend were lawful demonstrations and protests.
Paranoid? Frankly, I think NOT. Though far from believing that the population at large has become less tolerant to such challenges I certainly believe that governments -aka- the establishment have.
It was one of Tony Benin’s more (and very valuable) assertions that democracy starts on the streets and ends at the ballot box. The “Colstan Statue “ case points the lesson that there is a vital need for each such case to be given an airing on its own facts and merits rather than the tightening of the screw of such non violent challenges we are now witnessing and which has been there to see for quite a long time now.
None of this, I ought to add, is to question the integrity of Sir Brian: after all he scarcely wrote the script of the inexcusable state we are now in through decades of neglect, the inability or disinclination of so many Justice Secretaries