Quiz question: In what year were jurors first allowed to go home while deliberating their verdicts instead of being shut up in a hotel? It’s not as long ago as you might think. Or perhaps you believe the quarantining of jurors should never have been abandoned, given the supposed new dangers of prejudice via Twitter …
Category archives: The Justice System
The Jury: Perverting the Course of Justice
Forget the legal inaccuracies, the irrelevant sub-plots and the intrusive commercial breaks. What really killed off ITV’s The Jury was a lack of confidence in courtroom drama. It looked promising enough. Written by the Oscar-nominated author of Frost/Nixon and The Queen, Peter Morgan, The Jury was screened over five consecutive days and starred Julie Walters …
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Sam Hallam: A Miscarriage of Justice?
There’s a famous quote from the film Shawshank Redemption, when the main character Andy Dufresne tells another prison inmate: ‘Everybody in here’s innocent. Didn’t you know that?’ So when a young man convicted of murder steps forward and strongly protests his innocence, it’s often hard to keep an open mind. It’s still harder to accept …
Victims, their families and the courts
There’s no denying that the court process can be gruelling for the families of murder victims. They are plunged into a world over which they have no control, a world ruled by men in wigs who appear to have little consideration for their feelings. Their role is to sit quietly at the back of court …
Off the Map: The death of Charles Bunyasi
The death of Charles Bunyasi began as a murder investigation but will now ‘drop off the map’. Why? Because it no longer counts as a homicide. Mr Bunyasi was run over by his own van after it was stolen by a thief. The exact circumstances are unclear but detectives have charged the suspect only with …
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