75ZT Community

This is another rant, but one which I hope will make the workings of local justice clearer. What follows happened in my Court but there are myriad similar stories all over England and Wales.

This morning I was in Court to conduct the remains of a "part heard" trial. Most unsatisfactory in any respect, a part heard trial occurs when a trial, set for a certain amount of time, cannot be completed in that time. As a result, there is a major administrative nightmare of arranging a suitable date when the trial can be completed, ensuring that all of the original Bench can be present, along with the original legal advisor, civilian witnesses, Police witnesses, interpretors, prosecutor, defence advocate. As you can imagine, this is something to be avoided. Ultimately, if a suitable date cannot be agreed, the trial is declared a mis-trial and it all has to start over again, which is in itself a nightmare as all the previously examined witness have to return to Court as well.

If you've never been to Court as a witness, you can only imagine the stress involved, especially if the witnesses, defendant, injured party are children or vulnerable in some other way.

OK, in the middle of January I started a trial where the defendant was charged with several assaults in a domestic violence setting where two of the I/Ps were allegedly assaulted purely because they had special educational needs.

It became clear at about noon that the trial was not going to finish within its allocated time slot so the legal advisor began, reluctantly, to canvass a part heard date. Now, in this case, the Court was due to sit in the afternoon and everybody was willing to return after lunch to conclude the trial. Except that we were not "allowed" to do so because these days trials must fit within certain time-frame boxes. Previously, our afternoon caseload would have been moved to another Court without any problem at all.

Now, to cut a long story short, it took the legal advisor and the admin staff in the listing office two hours and ten minutes to make the arrangements for the part heard date which was, clearly, today. The trial was completed in just over one hour and that, I've every reason to think, would have been the time required on that afternoon in January. Probably less in fact, as things were fresh in minds and didn't need refreshing as was the case this morning.

So vulnerable witnesses had to be brought back to Court twice, the whole morning Court was written off for the completion of the trial and I'm convinced that the overall quality of the trial will have been compromised by the enforced break in between the two parts.

Does it make sense? Is that a good way to administer justice? Well, it is to the bean counters. Let me explain.

If a trial extends into the afternoon when not scheduled to do so, that is counted as a cost against the budget whereby a certain number of cases can be dealt with in a given amount of time. The senior management would have been hauled over the coals to explain the breakdown in their very neatly ordered system.

If, however, the trial goes part heard to another day, that doesn't count as it can be absorbed into the system as just another day at Court, giving, in my view, a thoroughly mis-leading impression that things are working and being maintained within budget when in fact, what would have been the costs of just over an hour of Court time in the afternoon turned into over two hours of administration PLUS the time required to complete the trial today.

The personal and psychological cost to those involved in the trial counts for absolutely NOTHING.

Justice at any cost? Don't make me laugh.

Well, it is 40 years since I did Jury Service and must admit I was amazed at how inefficient the whole thing was.....

Extended lunch breaks because it was not worth another witness being called before lunch.
Early finishes because it was not worth another witness being called.
and the overall slowness of the proceedings.

Now, there might have been factors that I was not aware of but it seemed that if a commercial (or indeed public sector) organisation behaved in that way then they would go bust.

Paul sounds very much to me as though Magistrates Courts are governed by rules that are nonsensical, also sounds as though those actually involved have no input to improve things both economically and emotionally.

The wheels of justice grind exceedingly fine....

Put simply the bean counters have the wrong budget rule in place which in turn drives the wrong behaviour as a workaround will always be found to achieve targets, happens in all sorts of organisations.

A large airline once surveyed its customers asking them what improvements they would like to see at airports and the most popular was to get the luggage off the plane and onto the carousel much quicker to save hanging around.

So the airline introduced a performance measure to make the improvement and after a few months noticed that the time recorded by one airport was much better than the others and wanted to use them as the shining example so went to see how they were achieving such good results.

The measure was the time it took to get the first case on the carousel and the airport with excellent results were taking a car on the runway throwing the first case off the plane into the car then driving to the carousel and putting the case on in double quick time

The poor passengers had one case going around but had to wait for the others as usual so there was no improvement but the stats looked great

The measure would have been better if it had been the last case on the carousel so the idea was a good one but drove the wrong behaviour just as living within budget is a good measure and essential these days but you need the right measure which cannot be manipulated

Bean counters and statisticians, ughhh

Isn't there a latin phrase which refers to justice being swift?

Cheers

Mike

celerem iustitiam ?