Farrukh Dhondy | UK Jails Are Overflowing: Should Jury Trials Be Fewer?

“Say ‘no’ to everything proposed

Be negative, don’t give a shit

The Positivists have overdosed

The Negativists must use their wit

Denial is a strong beginning

Of alternative ways to go

Determinations delivering

Newly defiant ways to grow!”

From Kismet Haddi by Bachchoo

They say the UK jails are overflowing and its courts are overwhelmed with cases? The obvious conclusion is that crime requiring the law to be exercised and custodial sentences to be passed, is on a steep increase.

Not so. Statistics tell us that in the past decade crime has dramatically decreased. And yet the sceptred Isle has a court jam crisis and its jails are overflowing with condemned criminals.

Like the behaviour of sub-atomic particles in quantum mode, the reality eludes common sense.

The new government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham has in its first weeks faced a public outcry against the attempt to alleviate jail overcrowding by releasing some prisoners. The media, and the public through it, have stated their strong objection to the early release of, say, prisoners whose actions have led to the death of police officers. These convicts may not have killed their victims with murderous intent, but their action nevertheless led to the death of the innocents and they were convicted of manslaughter. The previous government moved to free up prison cells by releasing some of these.

Huge outcry.

Burnham has now decreed that no prisoners convicted of manslaughter will be released before the completion of their sentences. This government and the prison service have to find other ways of tackling overcrowding in jails.

One of these ways has to be, for instance, the release of a young man who has been in prison for 20 years for stealing a mobile phone. He was given a two-and-a-half-year sentence which was considered proportionate to the petty crime, but then was kept in jail through an ordinance called IPP, imprisonment for ‘public protection’.

Burnham and the prison secretary Catherine McKinnell have now announced the possible release of very many of those held in prison through this ordinance.

And the queue of court cases? The last justice secretary passed an ordinance, abolishing jury trials for crimes for which the mandatory sentence is less that three years.

A significant section of the public, and now important parts of the media, are opposed to such a restriction of jury service. They contend that it degrades the civil rights of accused citizens who have traditionally been tried by a jury of their peers.

Channel 4 TV has decided to tackle this debate head-on. They have commissioned a four-part drama based on the real trial of two young male offenders, one aged 14 and the other in his early twenties, who brutally murdered their mother’s new husband (whom neither regarded as a stepfather) as he slept. They stabbed him 69 times and slit his throat.

The drama re-enacts the trial exactly as it happened but with all the names changed, using a jury of 12 citizens of Cambridge, where the murder took place, who knew nothing previously of the crime or the trial. They come fresh to the case and we, the audience, are invited to determine whether the verdict this drama jury pass will be the same as the former actual jury in the case of the two young accused.

So far, one fascinating episode has been transmitted, with the drama jury being filmed commenting to each other and to camera what judgements they progressively make as the trial proceeds.

In my early, though short and happy, life in India, jury trials were abolished after a jury acquitted a naval officer called Nanavati when he shot and killed a Mr Ahuja who had had consensual sex with Nanavati’s wife in their Mumbai neighbourhood, while the commander was away on naval training. The case became sensational. People adapted the pop song ‘Tom Dooley’ to sing:

“Hang down your head Nanavati

Hang down your head and cry

Hang down your head Nanavati

Poor boy you’re bound to die…”

He didn’t die, the jury pronounced him innocent, though he shot Ahuja in cold blood, and the judge subsequently declared it a ‘perverse verdict’. End of jury trials which had proved that social mores against adultery outweighed strict legal considerations. The navy intervened and spirited Nanavati away to prevent him being retried and executed. I even believe he eventually reconciled with his wife.

I am inclined to believe in the British reform restricting jury service to non-trivial cases because the only time I was conscripted on a jury I had to give up five days of work to attend to cases which a magistrate would have dealt with in a day. One of these was a young man accused of breaking into a car and stealing a country-and-western music cassette. He pleaded not guilty saying he hated that particular song which was entitled ‘Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town’.

The presiding judge was clearly a South Indian gentlemen of the British bench. The defence explained to the court that the song was about an ex-US soldier who had has his sexual organs shot off during the Vietnam war, and on returning home implores his wife not to ‘go to town’ and have sex with other men.

“And this is a song?” The very alarmed judge asked?

Apart from laughing our heads off, we acquitted the thief.