John Linton
.....seldom enjoyable, but courtesy of the NSW Sheriff, is becoming impossible.
I do very little international (and no national) business travel these days except for the quarterly trips to Sri Lanka to review and better understand the progress of our pretty new operation in Colombo and combining some business aspects in to our annual vacation in the EU. The difficulties of traveling to Sri Lanka increased last year with significant reductions of the number of flights leaving Australia for Singapore, Malaysia or Thailand and the lack of flights at realistic times from those 'mid way' points to and then from Colombo. This means it's often a struggle to find flights at all and almost impossible to find connections that don't leave you' over nighting' or else facing up to 10 hour 'transit times'. So we book well in advance and that allows a minimising of the hassles.
All well and good until the NSW Sheriff sends you a demand to pencil in 8 weeks of your time from date XX for jury service. Not too catastrophic because there is a list of reasons you can apply for exemption which include you won't be in Australia at the time. So, I dutifully fill in the form and attach the required proof and send it off only to receive back another missive from the Sheriff that tells me my application for exemption has been reviewed and declined. Not only do I have to be in Colombo for a week but 4 weeks after that I have to be in Japan for a completely uncancelable, once in a lifetime, personal event which I cannot cancel - it is specifically date dependent and has been 'scheduled' for the whole of my life. So I am left with a no win situation that will cause great difficulty if I am to do my civic duty.
I have no problems with doing what is required of me as a 'good citizen' and have in fact actually done it twice before in my life (which begs the question as to why I get a third summons when most of the people I know have never got one). Those previous 'tours of duty' were a complete waste of time for everybody concerned and made me realise how totally useless a jury system is in the 21st century (or in fact any other century when you look at it).
My first experience, in Melbourne's central criminal court, was a corporate fraud/embezzlement case that although in the criminal court was a civil case. "Twelve good men and true" in this instance turned out to be a miscellaneous group of 6 mainly female retirees, 3 manual workers of little or no education and 3 'business' type people. The case was scheduled to last 6 weeks but at the first morning tea break one charming and grandmotherly juror confided in me that the accused was "so guilty - you can see it in his shifty eyes". So much for listening to the evidence. At the end of the first day or so - nine of the jurors had made up their mind that the guy was guilty and I decided the whole process was a waste of time and joined them in not listening to what was being said and trying not to fall asleep too often as the days droned on. Fortunately, and for whatever reasons some way in to the fifth week the the prosecution and the defence decided that the case could not continue (after a couple of days of 'jury step out for a moment' type consultations') so the 'jury was dismissed'.
The second occasion was somewhat similar with the accused being in the dock for allegedly stabbing a convenience store owner during a robbery. Again by lunch time 8 or 9 of the jurors were convinced the poor guy was guilty ('you just have to look at him' was an eerie echo of my previous experience plus a couple of nice racist prejudices along the lines of 'they all do it'). I did listen to the evidence this time and I couldn't see that there was any real chance the guy did what was alleged and that was the view of two others. So when the time came to deliver a verdict the 'hang them all' group talked for the best part of two days and then wanted to go home. It was a split vote with no possibility of being resolved and after a couple of meetings with the judge the whole fiasco was declared a mis-trial and everyone went home.
It seemed obvious to me that I certainly didn't understand anything about the first case and couldn't possibly have had any sensible view on guilt or innocence and in the second case I really didn't understand either the rules of evidence or the actual evidence and I'm pretty sure all but one or two people in both juries were in the same position - perhaps all of them.
I think it's long past time that juries were abandoned - they can never understand what is going on and prejudice has always been alive and well in English speaking societies so you would have thought that someone would have noticed by now.
PS: the blog is late today; for reasons I don't know the original 'disappeared' and I took time to attempt to re-write it.