Why exclusion of 400,000 Scots from jury duty is an affront to democracy
Out-dated computer system used to select juries, which cannot accommodate new addresses, needs to be replaced
Some 2,500 years ago, arguably the most important development in all human history took place in Athens. Rather than obey a king, a dictator or a group of the most powerful people, it was agreed that every citizen should have a say in the running of the city state.
The birth of democracy, imperfect as it was, has long been celebrated by those who value freedom. A less well known aspect of this revolutionary new form of government was the invention of juries. The ancient Athenians thought so much of this way of reaching a verdict in criminal and other legal cases that they paid their jurors so the poorest citizens could take part. Indeed, it was their duty to do so.
The US National Judicial College puts a similar importance on jury trials, spelling out why they are important to democracy: “The definition of tyranny is oppressive power exerted by the government. Tyranny also exists when absolute power is vested in a single ruler. Jury trials are the opposite of tyranny because the citizens on the jury are given the absolute power to make the final decision.”
‘Totally bonkers’
Yet in Scotland today, approximately 400,000 potential jurors are unable to perform this crucial role because of an outdated system used by the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS), which is unable to include many people who live in new-build properties.
In an interview we publish today, David Fraser, the SCTS’s executive director of court operations, said: “There’s definitely an element of exclusion, because if those people have an address which cannot be ingested into our system, they are excluded. That’s what we are trying to avoid...”
This comes at a time when just under half of citations for jury duty receive no response and courts are struggling to deal with a large backlog of cases. A new “effective and modern” system had been planned, but it was put on hold last year because of Scottish Government funding cuts.
Scottish Liberal Democrat justice spokesperson, Liam McArthur, surely spoke for us all when he said it was “totally bonkers” that people in new houses were being “effectively excluded from jury duty because the computer system can’t handle your address”.
Not everyone likes serving on a jury. But if we were wrongly accused of a crime, the vast majority of us would want our case to be heard by one. Scotland needs to get its act together on this issue, and quickly.
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