"Not since 1641 and the abolition of the feared Court of Star Chamber, used by monarchs for political ends up until the civil war, have citizens been tried for really serious criminal offences on indictment in the absence of a jury.
However, the principle has now been limited by Parliament under the Criminal Justice Act 2003".
Thanks to New Labour the police state threw yet another coil of barbed wire around us today with the start of a trial with no jury, in case of 'juror nobbling'.
Thanks to all the morons who voted Labour in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Let's hope they come for you next, and nobody lifts a finger to help.
Full BBC report here.
2 comments:
There are no independent juries used anywhere in continental Europe, where criminal justice is run on Napoleonic-inquisitorial principles.
Their system of criminal justice is completely alien to our traditional system.
Labour is wedded to the idea of Britain's complete absorption into the nascent European State.
The EU already has a blueprint for a single EU-wide criminal code, called Corpus Juris, based on the continental system.
Article 26.1 of Corpus Juris does away with juries and lay magistrates. Guilt or innocence is to be decided, as on the continent, by case-hardened professional career judges.
Corpus Juris was the subject of a House of Lords Report in 1999, which rejected it. But now with Lisbon we shall no longer have a veto.
The new EU Commissioner Lithuanian A. Semeta announced 4 days ago, in reply to a question by Marta Andreasen MEP, that he would push for the introduction of the European Public Prosecutor, which is the centrepiece of the Corpus Juris project.
In order to prepare the British public for this transformation, Nu-Labour has been hacking away at jury trial (and other safeguards) on spurious pretexts, as "domestic" initiatives.
That way, when Corpus Juris is finally introduced from Brussels, it will not seem so "foreign" and "alien", and resistance to it will be that much less.
Many thanks for that Torquil.
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