Trials make irresistible reading. The slow discovery of truth, the revelation of other people’s usually disgraceful lives, the battle of cross-examination and the warm and comfortable feeling induced by reading about other people in deep trouble make them always popular.
More important, the fairness of our trial system is a mark of our civilisation. By introducing imprisonment without trial and attacking the golden threads of British justice such as the presumption of innocence which means that the burden of proof should always be on the prosecution, the present Labour government, through its disastrous home secretaries, has demeaned our judicial system. It is hoped that they will pay the penalty for this at the forthcoming election. What is needed now is a clarion call to restore our civil rights and our hard-won liberties and return our trial system to its civilised standards.
Sadakat Kadri, a member of the bar both in England and New York, has written less a passionate defence of juries than a potted history of trials. He summarises some of the world’s most famous cases. He denies the honour of introducing trial by jury to Magna Carta, although it provides ‘that no one shall be condemned or imprisoned unless by the lawful judgment of his peers’. He awards it instead to a woman who couldn’t be tried by the ordeal of battle, so some of the neighbours were called in to decide her case. He is scholarly and instructive about the days when the passion for justice and the longing to punish evil deeds were so great that ‘creatures from bulls to beetles were regularly prosecuted, tried and punished at public expense’. Not only did weasels and rats face elaborate trials, but the corpses of dead heretics, suicides and sodomites were brought to court in manacles and had lawyers appointed to defend them.
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