C4 The Jury Murder Trial

I think we should continue to call people randomly, but they should be called for jury training. About 4 days. This would cover what a jury does, how the court works, who's who. What assistance they can get to help during the trial e.g. questions they can ask. A couple of case studies with discussions and a tour of the local court and seat in the pubic gallery to watch part of a trial.

During this time the trainers could sift out those with very domineering personalities, or entrenched views, even racists, then there are people who are unable to concentrate for more than 20 minutes, people who have difficulties processing spoken and written language be that due to their level of English or whatever reason that can't be overcome by reasonable adjustments.

After this they are sent home with the knowledge that they MAY be called up at any point in the next 12 months (or longer). We would then have a trained group of jurors across the country who have been assessed as being capable to take part. The ones that weren't included need never know?? LOL!

This would also allow us to create sub-groups of trained jurors with some maths and financial knowledge for fraud cases or health knowledge, science knowledge whatever and ensure that these people are allocated trials where this could be useful. I am quite sure that many fraud trials do not have juries with a background in maths or finance and that they simply do not understand a lot of the complicated information being presented to them and just choose what the other jurors are doing.

People would be paid the equivalent of their weeks salary to complete the training and then the normal rules around juries would follow. Payment is an issue. You are entitled to expenses and your company is requested to pay you but most don't and many professionals decline jury service because they don't want to lose their wages. Solicitors and those involved in the law can't currently sit on jury but we could revise this so that a solicitor whose main role was house conveyancing and weren't involved in criminal law could do it.

The database of trained jurors would still select a random 12 but could ensure that for instance, 4 were randomly selected from the finance group etc. I think a lot of the sub-postmasters would have got off if juries had financial people on them - even IT people who could be another sub-group.

Just my thoughts anyway.

There were things we didn't see like any forensic cross examination or the judges summary.

I have to presume the judge in the actual case steered them towards manslaughter and he didn't give him a long sentence. 7 years to be out in 3 and a half given time held on remand. You can get up to 26 years for manslaughter. This depends on whether you try to cover it up, move or desecrate the body, kill more than one person etc.

Her family have maintained that she was put on trial more than him and although she had mental health problems she was close to her children and saw them regularly.

I think everything came to a head when she started moving his 'precious' possessions about. He talked about how they were special and he'd collected them over years. I genuinely think he couldn't cope with her changing things in his house. The suggestion that she went wild and was smashing everything wasn't born out by the photos of the Welsh dresser bedecked with plates and ornaments on the window sills. I've never thrown a cup buy people do and it turned out to be two cups and four small plates. This was just played down so much. So low key but I think that was it. His stuff getting moved and his stuff getting broken.