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- The Guardian, Monday October 1 2007
I can help him in his detective work. There is no doubt that the English adversarial system of criminal justice, with the emphasis on the trial itself, needs the services of lawyers far more, and is therefore more expensive than the continental inquisitorial process, where the vast majority of the legal work is done pre-trial. And lawyers are paid more in this country than elsewhere. The civil legal aid bill is high (though currently being squeezed) partly for the same reasons (lawyers' fees, elaborate procedures), but also because our scheme is still, in spite of cuts, the most wide-ranging. It is also more expensive because other countries have different ways of dealing with legal disputes.
So all Jack Straw needs to do is to radically reform our systems of criminal trial and civil litigation, then slash the excessive fees paid to some lawyers. If he does the legal aid bill may well be reduced; the danger is that the savings will be at the expense of justice.
The government has wisely decided to abandon its proposal for an expert witness to explain to juries some of the myths and psychological factors surrounding rape, but I'm not sure the alternative being considered is any better. This would involve experts agreeing on a statement about the different ways rape affects its victims, and the trial judge reading it to the jury. I cannot see how a "one size fits all" statement, on a complex psychological issue, could be anything other than overly complicated, or reduced to such simple terms as to be worthless. Will it encourage women to report being raped if they know that the jury will have such a statement read to them? I doubt it.
When it was decreed in 1789 that judges appointed to the US supreme court should have no retirement age it was done for the protection of judicial independence. Judges could not be deposed when the government changed or they gave an unpopular judgment. The trouble was that when the court was set up no one predicted that people 200 years later would be living so long. In the nearly two centuries up to 1970 judges on the supreme court served an average of 15 years. Since 1970 the average has been 26 years. But now there are murmurs of discontent, led by academics in American law faculties. Longevity does not necessarily mean quality.
The movement is growing. A fixed retirement age is not far away.
Staff
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