Auld verdict - public must do its duty and jury service

The big legal story this week - the long-awaited publication of Lord Justice Auld's Criminal Court Review - was somewhat overshadowed by events in the wider world, but still gained an impressive number of column inches.

Reactions were mixed, with most papers focusing on the report's supposed 'knife in the heart for trial by jury', Daily Telegraph (9 October).The Independent (9 October) was one of the least impressed, describing the 'depressingly mechanistic' report as 'the legal establishment at its most asinine', and claiming that the author, Sir Robin Auld, 'must be made of truly illiberal stuff to have come up with a set of proposals that compromises justice to an even greater degree than the government's own Modes of Trial Bill'.Although The Times describes the report as 'controversial' (9 October), it welcomed the proposals to make it harder to escape jury duty, arguing that 'something must be done to bring home to the public that jury service is a public duty', and that 'the convenience of employers and the fear of disruption or boredom should not override the civic duty of citizens to sit in judgment on their peers'.The Guardian (9 October) agreed with the aim of 'making juries more representative by removing exempted professions', but Lord Justice Auld apparently 'undermines his own credibility' in his 'attack on perverse jury verdicts and his wish to make them subject to appeal'.

The Guardian is not alone in reserving some of its harshest criticism for this issue.

The Independent claims 'juries should have the freedom to be perverse', and The Telegraph - although agreeing that 'many of the recommendations for streamlining the system, reducing delays and offering more help to juries in reaching their verdicts' are 'sensible and should be put into effect' (10 October) - also maintains that 'by looking down his nose at ordinary jurors, Sir Robin risks doing more damage to public confidence in the justice system than a few eccentric verdicts'.However, as The Guardian commented that: 'The number of such cases [where the jury has returned a perverse verdict] can be counted on two hands' (9 October), and the reason why the media appears to have collectively leapt on this one rather small bandwagon is something of a mystery.'A few days after the publication of the report, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf waded into the highly charged debate over jury trials with a proposed compromise in the Guardian (10 October).

He suggested that instead of the report's proposal - that the right to a jury trial should be removed for middle-ranking offences likely to attract a jail sentence of up to two years - the upper limit of the sentence should be no more than nine or 12 months.

Lord Woolf also proposed a compromise on the report's controversial views on perverse verdicts, saying that he 'would not allow an appeal if the decision by the jury could or might have been one of principle, but would if the decision was otherwise clearly contrary to the only rational view of the evidence'.And finally, proof if any were needed of the fact that many lawyers occasionally over-estimate their true importance in society.

The Independent (9 October) tells how the Auld report was delivered more than 10 months late, and conspiracy theories were rife as to the reasons for the delay.

Apparently, 'one of the more far-fetched suggests that Lord Irvine found Sir Robin's proposals so unpalatable that he asked the Prime Minister to have a word with the American president, so that they could co-ordinate the bombing attacks on Osama bin Laden with the publication, thus burying the conclusions under a mountain of war coverage.' An idea that some Labour spindoctors might be proud of.Victoria MacCallum