Nearly half of all convictions in England and Wales are being decided in secret by a single magistrate without the defendant appearing in court or having any legal representation, a new report has revealed.
Out of a total of 1.5 million convictions handed down last year, some 772,580 were issued by magistrates behind closed doors under a system designed to speed up justice and clear the backlog of cases left by the pandemic.
In the name of efficiency, obviously.
I can see that this would be a task for AI in the future.
A lot of this sort of thing is understandable, because we do not want courts clogged up with lots of petty cases.
Where this is worrying, is that there is no concept of Due Process – the defendant cannot enter a plea, offer to repay or make good, explain the situation and so on. The Small Claims Court used to have ( haven’t tried it in years ) a really good online service for reclaiming monies, where both parties could make submissions.
BUT if the courts were run more efficiently in the first place, there wouldn’t be a need for this kind of Orwellian justice.
A way round it might be to issue a fine and only make it a criminal act if the fine is not paid.
If they can assign a judge to the case and they can arbitrarily make UK subjects do whatever the government wants them to do – they can increase the size of the jury pool and clear the backlog with a proper trial.
@Agammamon
Incentive matter. It’s in the legal professions interest to be able to bill a lot of hours work on a case so the slower and more inefficiently it can be processed the better. The problem comes when you try to tie up an unpaid jury for that time. Once again incentives matter.
“speed up not so much justice” TFTFY
Yes this makes it much easier to dictate the decision.
So illegal immigrant stabbists can be let go to stab again, while native Britons who publish mean tweets can all be convicted and imprisoned.
Too late for this party, but . . .
– A lot of this sort of thing is understandable, because we do not want courts clogged up with lots of petty cases.
No, if cases cannot be tried properly then they should not be tried at all. Serious cases should wait and petty cases be dismissed. Secret courts are not the answer unless the question is how do we get tyranny.
– A way round it might be to issue a fine and only make it a criminal act if the fine is not paid.
This is the most likely outcome for BBC license cases under Labour. The BBC will be given powers like “safety camera partnerships” to issue their own tickets against “offenders” and woe betide you if you trouble the courts by contesting.
@Agammamon – “they can increase the size of the jury pool”
There is no need to do this as the bottleneck is not finding jurors but finding courts, judges, counsel, and preparing the evidence. Jury service is already compulsory, so if more jurors are needed, that’s trivially achieved by sending out more letters to potential jurors.