Britain and its people need better legal knowledge.

From looking around, talking to people and generally living life, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great many Britons have zero idea how the justice and courts systems work. It may not always have been this way as I can recall as a child and a teenager ordinary working class Britons talking about high profile criminal trials. In particular I remember the discussions about the Craig and Bentley case and the issue of common purpose in crimes and how unjust it seemed that the under 18 who pulled the trigger and killed a man during a burglary gone wrong, got a gaol sentence for that crime whilst his older but mentally backward accomplice went to the gallows. My family and those around them wasn’t special, they were small business owners, manual workers, factory workers and one who had worked on a farm. They were not lawyers but they understood the law even if they may have questioned or debated the justice or not of one particular outcome. I’m also not a lawyer but I have worked as a court reporter covering criminal trials and it gave me knowledge of and interest in how the criminal justice system works.

Fast forward to today and from looking at social media there seem to be a great many Britons who don’t understand how the legal systems of these Islands work. They don’t understand the issue of a defendant being innocent until the prosecution proves them guilty, or that complaints about a crime are not considered as true until the court process is over and a guilty verdict has been given. There’s also no understanding of the reason why Britain doesn’t have the sort of lurid pre-trial reporting of criminal cases as there is in the United States, which is to primarily to protect any future jury in a case being tainted by information heard outside of the court and thereby being influenced by said information. Few people I’ve spoken to know to just what extreme lengths the English legal system will go to ensure that juries make their decisions on the information presented to a court by both prosecution and defence counsel and only the information presented in a court. These attempts to shield the jury from adverse influence has led to reporting restrictions on cases increasing in severity but the restrictions appear to have increased with the growth of news media and its ability to possibly influence the decision of any jury. You could not get away with the sort of court reporting today that went on at the turn of the 20th century. Reporters would not be allowed to get away with writing about a case not based on what has gone on in the court, but on knowledge from outside the court that the jury may not know. The sort of lurid, speculative reporting we would have seen back then is not to be found in British court reporting today. It’s possible for a news outlet to use this extra information after a trial has concluded with a guilty verdict, it’s called ‘background’ and in my experience background copy was clearly marked as such. You can gather the extra information but not publish it until the case is concluded. This is why there are often big spreads of reporting about court cases that include information that may, for various reasons, might not have been put before a jury.

Knowledge by Britons of court procedure is woefully bad in my opinion. This knowledge is so absolutely bad that it’s all too easy for a bad actor to say something about court procedure that I and others know is complete and utter bollocks but it be taken up and believed by others who know sod all about the legal process.

A good example of this comes from a recent murder case, which for reasons of sub judice I will not discuss in detail at this point, where there were claims made that the judge in this case had unanimously decided to ‘downgrade’ the defendant’s murder charge for manslaughter. Too many people in my view believed this nonsense claim. It’s often been the case dating back well over a century and a half that a Judge can remind a jury that there is an alternative charge of Manslaughter they can convict the defendant on if they do not find that the prosecution has proven that, as per the 1861 Offences Against The Person Act, the defendant had not killed a person ‘feloniously, wilfully, and of his Malice aforethought kill and murder the Deceased.’ A jury might convict a defendant for manslaughter if in their view the defendant did not intend to kill the deceased. You find juries convicting for manslaughter, even though the initial charge may have been murder, in cases such as a fight that went wrong and someone died but there was nothing about the evidence that met the legal standard of proof to prove intent to kill.

There’s also confusion among the public about why cases can sometimes take such a long time to come to court. They do not know just how mountainous is the pile of evidence that needs to be considered by both the prosecution and defence counsel or the need to be able to marshal any witnesses, there’s no knowledge of how slow the wheels of bureaucracy move or the ongoing and worsening problems with the court estate in England and Wales. It’s not, as some people might claim a case of the state kicking the can of some particularly horrific crime down the road. It’ often just the case that modern criminal cases are complex, there’s often written, digital, photographic, forensic and CCTV evidence to be managed and scheduling cases in our overburdened and creaky court system is fraught with frustration for all involved.

Do juries and judges get thing wrong, yes of course they do, they are human with human frailties and the ability to make errors as well as do well. There have been numerous miscarriages of justice in Britain where juries have convicted defendants on shaky evidence or people that I and others may have considered guilty who have received not guilty verdicts. In some cases where a defendant has been wrongly convicted an appeal can be made and a conviction can be quashed. There’s not much to be done about the wrongly cleared unless there is new and compelling evidence that points to the defendants guilt but in my experience a lot of those sorts of defendant end up in court again on different but sometimes similarly serious charges and get convicted. In these cases the wheels of justice have ground slowly and taken a meandering path but justice in the form of a conviction of a wrong’un has somewhat been achieved.

I find it shocking that so many people do not know even the basics about how the criminal justice system in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland are different) actually works. They don’t understand the concept of innocent until proven guilty, or the role of prosecution and defence counsel, the role of judges, the process of prosecution or the importance of juries only deciding a case based on the evidence presented to the court. To me it look like a shameful situation to have so many of a nation’s citizens ignorant of how the court system works. Maybe it’s different in the USA where schools often each Civics and similar subjects in order to familiarise students with how the US government and legal systems work? It’s quite possible that Americans, because of how they are educated, know more about how their Constitution and their legal system works than Britons do about British law and the British Constitution.

It’s not a good situation for a nation to have so many of its inhabitants who are so ignorant of how their country’s legal system operates. I’m not saying that everyone should be knowledgable of stuff like the Sentencing Guidelines, that’s the sort of detail for lawyers and anoraks like me to ponder over and comment on although I urge people to read these Guidelines as they are at the heart of why some sentences seem bizarre. However people should at the very least know the basics such as why people are not named before charge, why cases take so long to come to court, the role of the various players in a court trial and the necessity for there to be honest unbiased juries which are not influenced by any information heard outside the Court.

Basic information about how the law relates to how we are policed and what happens to criminal cases is not just to protect wrong’uns, although it occasionally inadvertently does. it’s to protect you and everyone around you from the potential malevolence of the State or its employees. It’s to protect you, if arrested, from being what was called ‘verballed’ and thereby signing a false police statement or having unrelated prior convictions presented to a live jury or having police present the court with a tissue of lies about you or a loved one and not being able to challenge police lies.

We have a relatively recent example of what can go terribly wrong when people without basic knowledge of how the legal system works encounter the criminal legal system. Following the protests following the Southport Atrocity hundreds and hundreds of people were picked up for often what I would call nonsense reasons, they were either bystanders to trouble or they had been caught up in one of Britain’s many speech crime laws. Too many of these people acted in ignorance of the law and out of bad advice and opted to plead guilty to offences when if they’d opted for a jury trial their outcomes might have been different and more reflective of the majority public view of the metaphorical men and women on the Clapham Omnibus who would have made up any juries.

Too many of those who pleaded guilty following the Southport Atrocity and got draconian sentences. At least one person died by their own hand in gaol because he pleaded guilty to a charge that if taken to a jury trial might have resulted in an acquittal. I know of at least one person who made online comments following the Southport Atrocity but who resisted the poor legal advice to plead guilty who was subsequently acquitted by a jury. That jury result was in my view more representative of public opinion in the country following the Southport Atrocity than were the sentences given for similar offences by Judges alone.

For a whole host of reasons, including self protection, Britons need to acquire more solid knowledge about how the legal system works. In the long term this would need to be achieved by schools teaching some form of Civics, but in the short to medium term it could be achieved by us as individuals just taking more time to be more informed. Yes the law can be complex in some areas as any part of the law in any legal system that is over one thousand years old will be, some judge or some jury somewhere and at some time has had a difficult case that may have created a legal precedent that impinges on us today.

We cannot as laymen and laywomen expect to understand all the law but we should at least know the basics. I want to see more Britons more informed and less Britons who believe bullshit merchants who post legal nonsense for clicks, giggles and profits. I want to see more Britons say ‘that’s utter bullshit’ when the Sovereign Citizen or the Freemen On The Land fraggles say that you can refuse to pay Council Tax by invoking contract law or bereaved families taking their grief and their ‘case’ to imaginary courts or obscure courts that have not sat since the early 1950’s. I want to see people protected from charlatans whether those charlatans are wearing police or other state uniforms or who have state authority or those who peddle on the fears and desires of the really vulnerable. We can’t protect ourselves without solid knowledge and we need to learn that solid knowledge and tuck it away until it might be needed either because of an arrest or to counter online bullshit merchants.

A citizenry that doesn’t understand the basics about how its legal system works is a citizenry that can be oppressed by the State and manipulated by those whose interests may be more selfish than selfless. However we can protect ourselves and others to a certain extent by being properly informed and I would recommend that every one learns the basics of how the law works in order to not be oppressed by the state or looking like a complete ignoramus on social media.

So, go and learn something, you never know it might save your life or at the very least your personal reputation. Knowledge is power, search it out and use it where necessary.

Links

The Craig and Bentley case.

https://capitalpunishmentuk.org/derek-william-bentley-a-victim-of-british-justice/

Sub Judice

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/sub-judice
1861 Offences Against The Person Act

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Offences_against_the_Person_Act_1861

A list of some miscarriages of justice in England
https://www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/article/wrongly-executed-famous-uk-miscarriages-of-justice