June 22, 2005
Explain how this is justice
Alice Miles
No juries for complex fraud trials? Fine. No juries for thousands of women sent to jail? Disgraceful
I?M NOT SURE why the Attorney-General insisted yesterday that the Government remains ?strongly in favour of trial by jury in the vast majority of cases?. I suppose he must have meant the vast majority of fraud cases, because the vast majority of all criminal cases are already tried without a jury. In 2003-04, some 1.3 million cases were tried in the magistrates? courts, without a jury, and about 95,000 went to the Crown Court. That?s fewer than one in ten.
When civil liberties campaigners protest about ending the centuries-old right to trial by jury, traceable back to Magna Carta, blah blah blah, for some reason they never mention this.
There is something not very sexy, I suppose, about all those shoplifters and people who couldn?t pay their fines coming up before the magistrates. And the women ? particularly the women. A sharp increase in the number of women jailed ? the female prison population has almost tripled over the past decade, a far sharper rise than among men ? has been led by low-level, poverty-based crimes such as shoplifting. These are not your multimillion-pound frauds.
In a detailed report last year, Women and the Criminal Justice System, the Fawcett Society examined the facts. Theft and handling stolen goods account for 60 per cent of female offending, compared with 36 per cent of male. Many of these are crimes of desperation. A Department of Health report two years ago found that ?women are more likely than men to commit ?acquisitive? crimes, eg shoplifting and fraud, through financial hardship particularly in relation to children?. It is because the crimes are relatively minor and tend to be non-violent that more than 70 per cent of women sent to prison are on short sentences of less than 12 months.
And many of these are sent into custody by magistrates, without being convicted by a jury. The most recent figures held by the Home Office, for 2003, show that 5,701 women were sent to prison by magistrates compared with 3,109 by a crown court. Thousands of women a year are being imprisoned, and more sent to jail on remand, so not even convicted, without having been tried by a jury which might have sympathised and released them.