{"id":24,"date":"2004-10-28T21:58:58","date_gmt":"2004-10-28T21:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/?p=24"},"modified":"2004-10-28T21:59:34","modified_gmt":"2004-10-28T21:59:34","slug":"miscarriages-of-justice-r-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/life\/2004\/10\/miscarriages-of-justice-r-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Miscarriages of Justice &#8216;R&#8217; Us"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently been discussing the changes in the law relating to jury trials with my dad. David Blunkett wants to   make the jury aware of previous convictions of a defendent during a trial (see the coverage in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/uk_news\/story\/0,3604,1335777,00.html\">Guardian<\/a> or the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk\/opinion\/main.jhtml?xml=\/opinion\/2004\/10\/27\/dt2701.xml#head1\">Telegraph<\/a>. The idea is abhorrent to me, a defendent should be convicted or released on the basis of the evidence and NOT on whether they&#8217;ve done similar things before. Even serial offenders should be given the chance to go straight. My dad argues that I&#8217;m patronising the jurors, and they should be able to disregard the information given it does not determine whether they commited the crime they are being tried for or not. I disagree, in most cases the information will be discarded  but as it is not relevant, it should not be presented in the first place, and will cause miscarriages of justice.<\/p>\n<p>I was hoping there would be an outcry in blogs which if mirrored elsewhere might cause a change of policy but the blogs I regularly read have been relatively quiet on the subject, there is <a href=\"http:\/\/thecurrentoutlook.blogspot.com\/2004\/10\/juries-to-learn-of-previous.html\">limited<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samizdata.net\/blog\/archives\/006846.html\">coverage<\/a> but outside the dedicated political blogs it hasn&#8217;t generated the hue and cry I&#8217;d hope for&#8230;hopefully it is a storm still brewing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently been discussing the changes in the law relating to jury trials with my dad. David Blunkett wants to make the jury aware of previous convictions of a defendent during a trial (see the coverage in the Guardian or the Telegraph. The idea is abhorrent to me, a defendent should be convicted or released [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[3],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.coralbark.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}