15th June:
It has been widely reported in the press that a barrister who is Queen’s Counsel was discharged from jury service in a murder trial at the Old Bailey last week. <\/p>\n
Judge George Bathurst-Norman is reported to have ruled that the presence of the “silk” might be prejudicial to the defendant. It was also reported that that the QC told staff that he recognised prosecuting counsel after being sworn in. <\/p>\n
The facts are not fully reported, and so much is speculation. We did report on 3rd June that this topic will give us something to talk about during the long holiday. <\/p>\n
On the one hand it is clear is that a judge has to ensure a fair trial, on the other hand it seems to us that judges are able to undermine the will of Parliament (Criminal Justice Act 2003). This case may signal the way barristers and judges will wheedle their way our of jury service “I recognise my learned friend for the prosecution”. Barristers are all deemed to know each other and by convention don’t shake hands with each other, so it is almost certain to be true.
In our office, we are taking bets on the certainty that Lord Justice Dyson’s presence in the jury box lasts no more than a few minutes, or even seconds. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
15th June: It has been widely reported in the press that a barrister who is Queen’s Counsel was discharged from jury service in a murder trial at the Old Bailey last week. Judge George Bathurst-Norman is reported to have ruled that the presence of the “silk” might be prejudicial to the defendant. It was also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}