Lay justice
J.A.G. Griffith
J.P: Magistrate, Court and Community Elizabeth Burney (Hutchinson £6.95) In a semi-official guide to the French judiciary, Georges Verpraet records that in Italy there are 8000 judges, in Federal Germany 16,000, in Great Britain 20,000, as against 4500 in France. Clever chaps these Frenchmen to manage with so few. But if we were willing to employ a wholly professional, fulltime bench no doubt we could manage with a few thousand. Instead we entrust over 90 per cent of our criminal cases to lay magistrates (helped by a legally qualified clerk) sitting without a jury.
Elizabeth Burney is a journalist and she has written a book, based mostly on her own field research in seven areas, on Justices of the Peace. She interviewed 59 of them and talked with many others in and around the courts. Her main aims were to obtain a factual picture of the workload and organisation of each bench, with particular reference to decision taking, to assess the working relationships of magistrates with each other, with their clients, with probation officers, police and lawyers; to discover whether there were any aspects of their work, especially in sentencing, where benches could be said to have developed definite policies; and to examine the working of the system of appointing J.P.s in those areas.
The result is sound, useful and informative though restricted in scope. It has no comparative element at all so we are not invited to consider how other judicial systems deal with this common problem of minor criminal offences. The author does not dabble in criminology, so we are not invited to look at the system through the eye either of the bird or of the worm. Indeed she does not record having talked to anyone who appeared as an accused person.
Her view is not uncritical but it is rather bland and sometimes patronising. For example: 'Some of the younger lawyers, probation officers and social workers appearing in the courts have a very strong personal, and sometimes political, commitment to removing the disadvantages under which they feel defendants appear. Though they include the inevitable lunatic fringe, inspired by muddle-headed far-left ideology, their activities as a whole are necessary and welcome'. She'd make a good J.P. herself in some areas I can think of.
The method of appointing J.P.s through local advisory committees is looked at with some care and our author advocates more publicity and even advances the dangerous view that possible recruits might be interviewed and rejected. (That would dry up a few hitherto reliable springs of local service, I hope). She wants to limit party political influence and suggests that those not being J.P.s should form a substantial proportion of the membership of advisory committees.
But I am not sure whom she is looking for as new blood. 'Lay justice' she says, 'is administered by people who, in the main, are moderate, fair and conscientious: decent people picked for their ability to get on with other decent people. If they are unduly restricted in background, age and experience this, it can be argued, is a price that has to be paid for ensuring that they have the dedication that is required for the amount of work nowadays expected of them ... It is therefore not surprising that those who choose magistrates lean heavily on traditions of voluntary service when seeking their dedicated minority. In doing so, they can also ensure that awkward, extreme, unco-operative and inconvenient people are excluded'. I wish I were absolutely certain that that last sentence was meant to be a joke. My experience has been that many citizens seek election to local authorities if not primarily as a stepping stone to the local bench then secondarily for sure. In more rural parts, being a J.P. is a rung on the social ladder several feet above the ground whereas standing for election to the local council requires mixing with the groundlings. So the most decent people go straight onto the bench while others whose credentials are less obvious maY have to become councillors first. Our author does not want J.P.s to be replaced by stipendiaries — or would coen-. sit ting ethis only if 'it could be prov conclusively that professional lawyers ito!. _ ting alone — or even with lay assessor;s .s produced consistently better results. 1.0:31 indeed difficult to see what is the P .es from which all these new stipendiarito would be fished. She rejects election. the bench also because 'it reqhuoiressu.l.tht_ja. thought to perceive' (oh dear) w system would fall 'unavoidably and d plasrut'y trously' into the hands of loca machines. At least, she says, the present methods 'do keep out most obviously hopeless choices'.
Why not elect all J.P.s and make it an electoral offence for any candidate to declare his allegiance to any political party or for anyone else to urge the candidate's election on party political grounds?
Our author's own suggestion is that the workload on J.P.s might be treated flexibly so that those who are at 'a particularly demanding stage of their family or job cycles' would be expected to sit less frequently. The lay bench, she concludes, might in the future 'prove to be just one of a whole range of new opportunities open to people who would otherwise become hurtfully idle or hedonistically active'. When criminal justice is conducted as therapy for the judge, may God help the accused. No one else will.
I admit this book often irritated me. But if you are interested in the matter, it is essential reading. Don't let me put you off. resigned because of the other fellows' disapproval of his unshakeable pacifism. He had been doing quite well, working on the theory of gamma functions. At some stage, for reasons which are never explained in this prolix and ill-constructed biography, he had become a parson, so that, unlike Bertrand Russell, who left Cambridge under a similar cloud, Barnes had a job to go to. He became Master of the Temple and subsequently a Canon of Westminster, and he soon made a name for himself as a controversialist.
His Was the classic example of the second-rate empirical mind which believes that truth can only be apprehended by mathematical and scientific enquiry. Nowhere is this incapacity more obvious than in his attitude towards the Eucharist, which he appeared • to regard as a dangerous form of magic, begging Cosmo Lang to remove it from the Coronation Service of 1937. 'They pretend that a priest, using the right words and acts can change a piece of bread so that within it there is the real presence of Christ'. But, he argued, if there were such a change, 'chemical analysis would enable us to detect it'.
This quaintly 16th-century obsession was not to emerge at once. When he first became a bishop, he was better known for his crude contempt for the Book of Genesis and his political radicalism, What Macdonald probably meant by saying that Barnes let them down was that he had no sooner been loosed on Birmingham than he became one of the most vitriolic persecuters in Anglican history. He gleefully nosed out churches adorned with illegal ornaments and harrassed clergymen whom he suspected of having any time for the Virgin Mary. The filial biographer is clearly much in sympathy with this aspect of his father's career and speaks of the malicious hounding of ritualists as if it were a necessary cleaning up operation. When Fr Rosenthal, the slum priest, invited his bishop to the 50th anniversary of the dedication of St Agatha's, Sparkbrook, we are told, 'Clearly Barnes could not ignore such impertinence'. The bishop's reaction —odd enough for a diocesan in replying to a private invitation — was to issue a long statement to the Press, denouncing the practice of reserving the Blessed Sacrament. He claimed to be shocked that any clergyman could depart so seriously from the 39 Articles.
For his own part, Barnes sat lightly to all the more specifically doctrinal articles; by the time he wrote The Rise of Christianity, he appeared to have abandoned belief in the Virgin Birth, Miracles, the Incarnation and the Resurrection.
Not that religion was his only concern. In 1929, he called for a restriction of immigration by those of 'a lower culture' by which he meant Irish. By the 1940s he was also advocating the sterilisation of the poor; the only alternative, as he saw things, was the growth of 'slovenly, vicious, idle wasters'
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