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Jury service can be a traumatic experience – but it can also restore your faith in humanity

Join juror Rob Hastings as he sits on a real trial and examines whether the system still works, in the first of a major four-part series

Part One

The three teenagers in the dock stare at us while we file back into the courtroom for the last time, searching for any give away signs that might reveal their fate. They’re not alone. The judge, the barristers, the detective who investigated the case – all of them watch. All of them wait.

We sit in the same two rows of blue chairs at the side of court seven in Southwark, central London, where we have looked on and listened to prosecution and defence arguments. Suddenly it’s as if we’ve moved from the darkness of theatrical stalls, watching a legal drama unfold, to the spotlight of the stage, responsible for the finale ourselves. I can’t say it’s a nice feeling. My face feels hot, my hands clammy.

Our foreman, Victor – a cheerful, tanned TV advertising exec dressed in one of his jazzy shirts as usual – is about to stand and reveal our verdicts on nine charges. Rather him than me.

And yet, putting aside this last-minute nervous tension in the room, I feel lucky to have done jury service.

It may take over your mind during a trial, when you go to bed still mulling over whether to trust a piece of evidence. But smiles shared with your fellow jurors can help you through – maybe while listening to a middle-aged barrister awkwardly asking a teenage witness about the social significance of “spudding” (more commonly known as a fist bump), or overhearing that the court’s judges are complaining they have not received their usual morning supply of oranges.

I realise it sounds earnest, but there’s also a sense of pride. A disturbing case might make you wonder what is wrong with the world, but serving on a good jury can restore your faith in humanity.

(Image: i Graphics Team)

Many barristers, judges and police officers still passionately believe juries are the best way of delivering justice. Amid concerns over how jurors handle difficult rape or fraud cases, however, and with the internet making it easier for them to misbehave covertly, significant figures are questioning whether this age-old tradition should be reformed or even abolished.

People’s experiences of serving as jurors are rarely reported. Although we are all allowed to talk about our cases once proceedings are over, the ban on discussing deliberations means that in practice very little is ever shared in public, for fear of inadvertently breaking the law. Even the highest legal authorities in the land never hear how a jury reached its verdict.

Over the next four days, i will provide a unique glimpse inside this secretive institution, through the in-depth story of one real-life case as well as the revealing testimony of past jurors and those who work in the courts day in and day out. If the system is on trial, do we find it guilty or not guilty?

A scene from the Ministry of Justice’s guidance video, shown to all jurors before they start (Photo: MoJ)
A scene from the Ministry of Justice’s guidance video, shown to all jurors before they start (Photo: MoJ)

Luck of the draw

When the news comes, it arrives on a pink sheet of paper. “Jury summons,” it says in a big, bold, magenta font at the top. The bright colours, I suppose, are to avoid intimidating people – but it’s still a bit of a shock.

Opening the envelope, I had expected to find a gas bill or credit card statement. Instead my eyes flick from the royal coat of arms to the location of my upcoming jury service – “The Crown Court at Southwark” – to the date two months ahead, 6 August 2018, to the “warning” at the bottom of the first page:

You may be committing a criminal offence punishable by a fine of up to £1,000 if: You do not respond to this summons without a reasonable excuse; You do not attend for jury service without…

My pulse speeds up. I’m excited but nervous. Excited because of all the times I remember being engrossed by John Thaw in Kavanagh QC as a teenager, because I’ve only been in a courtroom three or four times before – always watching on as a lowly reporter – and because I’m about to get at least a couple of weeks off work. Nervous because what case will I be put on? Will my company mind me being away? What if we make the wrong decision?

What are your chances of being summoned for jury service?

Across England and Wales, the chance of being summoned for jury service is 35 per cent, according to the Ministry of Justice. Only half of those people will sit on a trial, because many are excused, ruled ineligible or surplus to requirement.

The figure is likely to be similar in Northern Ireland, but thought to be is far higher in Scotland – calculated at 95 per cent by statistician Deirdre Toher – because 15 people form a jury rather than 12, and the groups they are selected from are also bigger.

Jury summons like mine, and citations as they are called in Scotland, are sent to 770,000 people in the UK every year. Inside the envelope is a booklet explaining whether or not you’re qualified. It looks like I am: I’m at least 18 and under 76, I’m registered to vote, I’ve lived in the UK for at least five years since I turned 13, I’m not subject to any mental health legal orders and I have never been sentenced to any time in prison.

I send a photo of the words “jury summons” on the letter to my boss on Whatsapp. “Oh crumbs!” she says. “You going to do it or defer?”

I could ask for a delay if I have a good reason, but only for a maximum of 12 months, and I certainly have no “exceptional circumstances” to be excused altogether.

However, the number of people who are successful in avoiding jury service after being summoned is on the rise, with 29 per cent now excused, up from 26 per cent in 2015.

Wriggling out doesn’t work for everyone. In 2010, a lower-league footballer argued that he must be let off because his team had an away match at Cheltenham Town. Carl Fletcher was told by Judge Francis Gilbert QC: “Captaining Plymouth Argyle is not sufficient reason for not doing jury service.”

As far as I can see, I tell my boss, I don’t have much choice. She sends me a thumbs-up emoji. I accept the summons using a new online system, and that is it. I’m going to court.

Jury systems around the UK

England and Wales:
Twelve people form a jury, picked at random from a group of 15, also randomly chosen. Judges, barristers, MPs, vicars, bishops, doctors and peers are all now expected to serve as jurors if they are summoned, under changes made in 2004. Under 2003 legislation, non-jury trials can be heard as a last resort when there is danger of jury tampering.

Scotland:
Juries consist of 15 people, selected from groups of 30. Many more people are exempt north of the border, including police cadets, special constables and members of the clergy, as well as various social workers and legal staff. MPs, peers, MSPs and armed forces personnel can also apply to be excused.

Northern Ireland:
Twelve people make up a jury here too. But during the Troubles, concerns about intimidation in terrorism cases led to ‘Diplock trials’ being decided by a single judge instead of a jury. First conducted in 1973, at their height up to 300 were held in a year. They were largely abolished in 2007, though the director of public prosecutions can still impose them in exceptional cases.

Rolf Harris was tried at Southwark Crown Court in 2017 (Photo: REUTERS / Neil Hall)
Rolf Harris was tried at Southwark Crown Court in 2017 (Photo: REUTERS / Neil Hall)

Could my trial last a year?

Perhaps it is down to the popularity of real-crime documentaries and podcasts these days, or maybe people have always been this interested. Either way, every time I tell a friend that I’ve been called up for jury service, the reaction is the same. “I’d love to do that,” they say. “I’m so jealous.”

“How do you get selected?” asks one, in case there’s a waiting list they can sign up for. (It’s simply luck of the draw.) “Do you already know what trial you’re on?” asks another. (I won’t know until I’m in the court, and I could be stuck in the jury room for a fortnight without being allocated a case at all.) “I hope you get a juicy one,” says someone else. “My cousin got a murder case. They loved it!”

Maybe my friends are unusually keen. Among the British population, research suggests that most people would decline a jury summons if it was voluntary, mainly for the inconvenience. It’s particularly bad if you’re not employed by a company that would continue to pay you; they are not obliged to do so.

For anyone who is self-employed or works in the gig economy, the idea is less appealing. You can claim for loss of earnings, but for the initial fortnight the maximum is just £64.95 a day. For longer trials, you can get £129.91 daily.

Jury service usually lasts two weeks at most. But one friend, who was working freelance shifts when she was among 50 potential jurors being picked for a 12-week trial, tells me how she had to plead with the judge that she would lose her job if forced to sit on the case. The judge relented, but not all would be so understanding.

Britain’s longest trial

The UK’s longest-serving jurors sat on a property fraud case in Scotland that began in September 2015. It was expected to last six months – but it finally concluded 20 months later, on 16 May last year. In total, they were inside the High Court in Glasgow for 320 days.

The case resulted in financial advisor Edwin McLaren, 52 at the time, being jailed for 11 years. His wife Lorraine was sentenced to two-and-a-half years, only to be released in March this year after just nine months – less than half the length of the trial.

The disruption to their lives had a lasting effect on the jurors, with some needing counselling and to be retrained at work.

Worse, I remember how my dad’s friend, Les, was placed on a trial in 1997 that was supposed to last three or four months. In fact, it took up nearly a year of his life.

“Did it feel like you had all been sentenced yourselves?” I ask him.

“It did for some of the jurors, I think,” he says. “Some of them were getting itchy. There was one woman who had to put off her holiday twice, so she was a bit aggravated.”

For Les, this epic trial came at a very sensitive time. His son-in-law had recently died of leukemia. Had he been given a traumatic case, it could have made things worse.

Instead he was placed on the Butte Mining trial, a major fraud case involving the flotation of a US-based company on the London Stock Exchange. It was highly technical at times and required the jury to be given a lecture in how mining works before witnesses could start testifying. But Les – who held a high-ranking job with a local authority – says on reflection it was good to escape his office for a new routine.

“I’d lost enthusiasm for work, my mind was on other things,” he says. “I just turned jury service into another form of work. You get on with it: I sit there, I take notes, we have discussions, we have meetings.”

Was it hard not being allowed to talk to people about the trial for all that time? Not with this sort of case, he says with a laugh. “When people ask, you just say, ‘It’s a complex fraud thing,’ and people soon lose interest anyway.”

Les was made redundant part of the way through the trial. He says his jury service had nothing to do with this, and given his family circumstances he was glad he didn’t have to return to his old job after the trial.

Many long-serving jurors have to retrain on returning to work and feel their careers have been harmed.

Orla O’Loughlin, who sat on the Jubilee Line corruption trial – which lasted 21 months before it sensationally collapsed in 2005 – told afterwards how she had missed out on promotion and pay rises in her job at a mobile phone company. It also forced her to cancel her wedding, and she had to borrow money to pay her mortgage six times when jury payments were late.

One of the reasons the case collapsed was that another juror, Neil Robertson, effectively went on strike after his employer demanded £9,000 in pension contributions out of his loss of earnings payments.

I can only hope I won’t suffer their fate as I set out on my commute for my first day.

Trial by jury – A brief history

1166: Juries of varying kinds have been used by the ancient Romans and Greeks, as well as the Vikings. But now Henry II of England begins legal reforms that lead to trial by jury – also influencing law in Scotland and around the world too.

1215: The right for people to be convicted “by the lawful judgment of his peers” is enshrined in England’s Magna Carta.

A common jury in the Royal Courts of Justice, London, in 1890 (Image: Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
A common jury in the Royal Courts of Justice, London, in 1890 (Image: Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

1670: The independence of a jury is confirmed by Bushel’s Case, when a judge imprisons Old Bailey jurors and demands they change their verdict, but they refuse and are later set free.

1921: Women sit on juries for the first time in the UK.

2004: A ban on police, judges, lawyers, doctors and clergy serving as jurors is lifted in England and Wales.

The fraud trial of former Tesco executive Carl Rogberg, seen here with his wife Amanda after he was cleared in January 2019, was among those held at Southwark Crown Court (Photo: REUTERS / Hannah McKay)
The fraud trial of former Tesco executive Carl Rogberg, seen here with his wife Amanda after he was cleared in January 2019, was among those held at Southwark Crown Court (Photo: REUTERS / Hannah McKay)

Inside the court

I immediately recognise Southwark’s long porch from TV news reports when I arrive just before 8.30am. After being scanned and searched, I’m among the first in the queue to register in the jury room. I head straight for the windows. Southwark has a great view – looking out on to the Thames, HMS Belfast and the City of London skyline – which is fortunate because people can be waiting in here for days.

At my table I find a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Jack Vettriano’s painting The Singing Butler. There’s a magazines table, and the books on offer include A Secret History of the IRA, the 1994 edition of Fodor’s travel guide to the USA and One Day by David Nicholls.

The room is as diverse as the average Tube carriage once it fills up with 100 or more people. From the young black guy playing on his phone, to the white pensioner typing slowly on her iPad, to the young woman in a hijab chatting away, I wonder how they all reacted after opening their summons letters.

“Are you a veteran?” one chatty bloke in a green polo shirt, with slightly irritating enthusiasm, asks a gentleman in a tweed waistcoat.

“I’ve been summoned three times actually,” he replies with a smile, “but I’ve always got out of it before.”

After a while we’re shown a 12-minute DVD, “Your role as a juror”, on a TV in the corner of the room, explaining the trial system.

And then we wait, all struggling to get the Wi-Fi to work. A man sitting opposite me, who must be a second-week juror because he arrived after registration, crosses his arms and buries his head between them on the table. For him, the novelty has evidently worn off.

The official guidance video shown to new jurors:

Southwark specialises in fraud cases, which makes me worry I could end up on a lengthy trial, like Les. But it also held several of the big Operation Yewtree trials. Rolf Harris, Max Clifford and Dave Lee Travis were all found guilty here of indecent assaults – and sexual offences trials present their own jury concerns.

Her Honour Judge Eleri Rees, who has overseen jury trials for 16 years and is now the Recorder of Cardiff, says sexual offences cases can be “very distressing” for jurors, who cannot share what they’re hearing while a trial is ongoing. “Sometimes when the charges are read out, especially if it’s something like the sexual abuse of a child, you can just see their faces fall, because that’s not a pleasant prospect,” she says.

“One of the changes I’ve noticed recently is that increasingly you’ll find sexual assaults may have been recorded or videoed. We’re conscious that there is a danger the jurors will have to deal with really graphic material that is quite shocking… You would not be human if you were not affected by it.”

For one case, she says, “we arranged for counsellors to come in for the conclusion of the trial, because we felt that the jurors would support each other through the trial, but at the conclusion it seemed something that could be quite traumatic.”

Her Honour Judge Eleri Rees QC is impressed with the resilience of jurors despite sometimes being exposed to harrowing evidence (Photo: Russell Hayes)
Her Honour Judge Eleri Rees QC is impressed with the resilience of jurors despite sometimes being exposed to harrowing evidence (Photo: Russell Hayes)

Chris Henley QC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association and a barrister with Carmelite Chambers, says: “This is a real, pressing, growing issue… People who are whisked out of their normal lives and confronted with very traumatic stories and events and images receive absolutely no support at all.”

It appears that more jurors may be having to deal with these issues. Sexual offences cases went up from 25 per cent of all jury verdicts in 2006 to 35 per cent by 2014, according to figures disclosed to i. In 2017, the most recent year where official data is available, juries had to try 5,784 defendants charged with sex crimes.

“Almost half of our trials will be sexual cases sometimes,” says Rees. “There’s been a huge increase over the last 10 years.”

One former juror who served on a case in Reading involving a teenage girl who had been abused for several years by her mother’s partner tells me that listening to evidence from the victim was “10 times worse than the most emotional film, because it was real life”.

This distress is not restricted to sexual cases. In the trial of Ceon Broughton, 30, who was jailed last week for the manslaughter of his girlfriend Louella-Fletcher Michie – after supplying her with a Class A drug at Bestival music festival in 2017 and filming her over the course of six hours as she slowly died – one juror had to be discharged reportedly because they found the footage too distressing.

Louella Fletcher-Michie’s death, after taking the drug 2CP at Bestival in 2017, was recorded by her boyfriend Ceon Broughton (Photo: Zoe Barling / PA Wire)
Louella Fletcher-Michie’s death, after taking the drug 2CP at Bestival in 2017, was recorded by her boyfriend Ceon Broughton (Photo: Zoe Barling / PA Wire)

Last year a juror on the 2015 trial into the sexually motivated murder of Becky Watts told ITV News that she felt deeply traumatised, with no “duty of care” provided. “I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep,” said Rebecca. “I felt very emotionally isolated… Once you’ve seen you can’t unsee.”

Clinical psychologist Dr Noelle Robertson at the University of Leicester, who found in a study a decade ago that a “small but significant number” of jurors are traumatised by evidence, says she gets several emails a year from people who have been “harmed” by their trials. “I worry that people’s lives are being damaged,” she says.

Some jurors are worried by the responsibility of coming to a correct verdict, says Robertson. “We also need to know far more about the things that cause jurors distress, not least in order that justice is then served. We don’t really have nearly enough evidence about how distress affects decision making among jurors.”

Robertson says she had been concerned by the “grim” trial of Aaron Campbell, who last month was found guilty of the abduction, rape and murder of six-year-old Alesha MacPhail on the Isle of Bute. “I hope those jurors are being given additional support,” she says.

Robertson adds that even seemingly innocuous pieces of evidence can spark traumatic responses in disturbing cases.

“I can remember very vividly one female juror in a child murder case saying that it wasn’t until she was shown a photo of the deceased child’s shoe, and she realised it was the same as her own child’s shoe, that she was drawn in further,” she says.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson tells i: “It is vital that jurors perform their public duty, even in distressing cases.” But they add: “We recognise that traumatic cases can affect jurors and that’s why a range of support services are already available, including counselling from GPs and advice from the Samaritans.”

But this is “completely inadequate”, says Mr Henley. “Anybody who has attempted to access counselling services on the NHS knows how sparse the coverage is and how long the delays are,” he says. “There should be professional counselling available at the public expense if jurors feel they need it at the end of those sorts of trials.”

Rees is confident that fellow judges and court staff are more sensitive to jurors’ wellbeing these days, however, providing breaks in proceedings when they can. She is also impressed at jurors’ resilience. “They grit their teeth and get on with it,” she says.

Back in Southwark, it’s noon when one of the staff apologises for the delay in trials starting. She explains the court’s computer system – which would normally pick 15 names at random every time a trial needs a jury – has gone down, so staff have been writing all our names on pieces of paper to do an old-fashioned ballot. She begins reading the batch for the first trial when she gets about halfway through: “Robert Hastings?” I’m up – and ready to grit my teeth if I have to.

Twitter: @robhastings

Now read Part Two of our series

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