The shaky scales of justice
John Mortimer
THE TRIAL: A HISTORY FROM SOCRATES TO O. J. SIMPSON by Sadakat Kadri HarperCollins, £25, pp. 474, ISBN 0007111215 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Trials make irresistible reading. The slow discovery of truth, the revelation of other people’s usually disgraceful lives, the battle of cross-examination and the warm and comfortable feeling induced by reading about other people in deep trouble make them always popular.
More important, the fairness of our trial system is a mark of our civilisation. By introducing imprisonment without trial and attacking the golden threads of British justice such as the presumption of innocence which means that the burden of proof should always be on the prosecution, the present Labour government, through its disastrous home secretaries, has demeaned our judicial system. It is hoped that they will pay the penalty for this at the forthcoming election. What is needed now is a clarion call to restore our civil rights and our hard-won liberties and return our trial system to its civilised standards.
Sadakat Kadri, a member of the bar both in England and New York, has written less a passionate defence of juries than a potted history of trials. He summarises some of the world’s most famous cases. He denies the honour of introducing trial by jury to Magna Carta, although it provides ‘that no one shall be condemned or imprisoned unless by the lawful judgment of his peers’. He awards it instead to a woman who couldn’t be tried by the ordeal of battle, so some of the neighbours were called in to decide her case. He is scholarly and instructive about the days when the passion for justice and the longing to punish evil deeds were so great that ‘creatures from bulls to beetles were regularly prosecuted, tried and punished at public expense’. Not only did weasels and rats face elaborate trials, but the corpses of dead heretics, suicides and sodomites were brought to court in mana cles and had lawyers appointed to defend them. As late as 1499 a woman who hanged herself in jail was hauled off to the gallows and hanged again to punish her for having done so.
Most of Kadri’s book is filled out by useful but brief accounts of former trials. He celebrates the brave jury who were locked up for days without food, drink or chamber pots because they refused to convict the nonconformist Penn of preaching in the street ‘to an unlawful assembly’. These heroic jurymen are honoured by an inscription on the walls of the Old Bailey.
There is also a fitting tribute to the great Sir Edward Marshall Hall who always ended his speeches for the defence by holding his arms out at an even height as though they were the ‘scales of Justice’. He then invited the jury to put on one side ‘that vital but small weight, the presumption of innocence’ and one arm would come down firmly in favour of an acquittal. One unsympathetic judge said he was always glad when Sir Edward got to his ‘scales of Justice’ because that meant that he was coming to the end of his speech.
The only one of these cases of which I had a direct experience was that in which Oz magazine having published, among other things, a picture of that well-loved character Rupert Bear in a state of high sexual excitement, the editors were charged with Socrates’ alleged offence of corrupting the young as well as publishing an obscene article.
Kadri doesn’t make it clear that the Oz editors’ case was won in the Court of Appeal and he strangely says that Judge Argyll ‘cast a spell’ over the trial. It seemed to me that the trial cast its spell over the judge, causing him such intense confusion that he once asked, ‘For those of us without a classical education, what is cunnilinctus?’ as though this sexual act was a type of cough mixture. It was left, as I remember, to Mr George Melly to tell the judge that in his naval days it was known as ‘yodelling in the canyon’. The appeal was won because Judge Argyll seriously misdirected the jury.
At the end of his book, Kadri rightly records a change of public opinion. We have lost our sympathy for the possibly unfortunate customer in the dock and become far more prosecution-minded. In America a president who says he is in favour of life has signed a record number of death warrants, and the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ laws have produced such ludicrous and tragic results as imprisonment for life on a charge of stealing a slice of pizza. He rightly says that a justified horror of serious crime should never be used to prevent the fairness of trials, or tempt us to forgo our civil rights and liberties. This may be the unhappy result of the fact that we have fallen out of love with Robin Hood and become seduced by the somewhat less attractive figure of the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Previous page
