The operation of the traditional court needs to be rethought to take into account technological advances that have rapidly changed society and influenced jurors, the lord chief justice (pictured) said this week.

Speaking a year after becoming head of the judiciary, Lord Judge said that the ‘oratory tradition’ of the courtroom might not help juries in the future.

He said: ‘The jury system depends on people coming to court and listening to people speaking, and then thinking about and assessing what they have heard. If a generation arrives in the jury box that is not used to listening… then that changes the whole oratory tradition that we are used to. The way our jury system operates will have to be thought about very deeply.’

He suggested that, in the future, juries might be handed evidence on computers to take away and evaluate.

Judge said that his main ambition over the next year is to ‘increase or restore public confidence in the administration of criminal justice.’ He also said that he is ‘extremely troubled’ by the ‘cascade’ of ‘extremely complicated and convoluted’ criminal justice legislation that has been passed by parliament in recent years. ‘We should have a system where people walking up and down the street know when they commit a crime,’ he said. ‘The legislative process hasn’t made that any more likely.’

Judge also backed the use of short sentences by Crown court judges. ‘The short sentence is sometimes the right sentence,’ he said. ‘If you have to serve your sentence in a very overcrowded prison, conditions – and there is a myth about how easy prison life is – are awful. If [a prisoner is] in custody in very crowded conditions… then the punishment is more severe than if they are not. For judges, if conditions are appalling they may want to reduce a sentence.’ He added that judges ‘spend a lot of time trying to decide what level of sentence is appropriate’.