Bail Again - Sorry!

Head Of Legal has posted one of the most cogent comments I have yet seen on the still-live issue of bail, bringing a welcome shaft of light to a debate that has hitherto generated mostly heat. It is here.

Worrying

This report in The Times will come as no surprise to many magistrates. It is an open secret that the administration of community sentences is, at best, patchy. I have a lot of sympathy for Probation staff; they have been buggered about for a decade or more, with their philosophy going through a 180-degree turn from 'advise, assist, befriend' to becoming a part of the punitive system. Kept perennially short of resources, reorganised time after time, it is a miracle that the organisation functions at all. The chaos is exemplified by the fact that I have a National Offender Management Service giveaway pen that has lasted longer than NOMS itself did.
One of the things that arouses my suspicions about the operation of community punishments is the fact that despite many requests I have been unable to arrange a visit to a project for fifteen years. Other magistrates tell the same tale.
A workable system of punishment in the community is essential to the adminstration of justice (I can visualise certain police officers wincing when they read this). The Probation Service needs our support. They also need the Government's support, and the best way to give that will be to fund them properly and then leave them alone to get on with the job.

Waste of Time

Went in at short notice today to chair a trial. Defendant didn't appear, so we proceeded in absence and found against him. We couldn't help any other court, as the proceedings were not CPS ones and we had no Crown prosecutor. Went to Tesco's on the way home and in the pub for a swift half by one o'clock.
Any JP will recognise the scenario.

How Not To Do It

It's easy for those of us who have many years of experience on the bench to look back nostalgically to the golden age when we were the new boys and girls. The courts were run by their magistrates court's committee, the police presented their own cases, and at breaktime our ushers would bring us our coffee and - yes - biscuits on a tray. Our Clerk to the Justices was master in his own kingdom and everyone knew who was in charge. We were trained by our own clerk in our own courthouse, and we operated local guidelines for local offences. Training was fairly perfunctory, and we did most of our learning on the job. In some shire towns and cities the Mayor was ex-officio Chairman of the Bench - heaven knows how that used to work.
There was no formal appraisal, and no system of training and approving court chairmen. Simple seniority determined who was to take the chair on the day, and once someone reached the heights of chairing Court One - the remand court - they were unlikely to chair any other; in fact some refused to do so, deeming it beneath them.

By far my worst ever case was heard when I had been sitting for about nine months. I can write about it now, partly because twenty years have passed and partly because my two colleagues have moved on to the great appeal court in the sky.
A man of 24 had pleaded not guity to drink driving. The facts were appalling. A young man of the same age as the defendant,and known to him, had been working on his car in the street. A car allegedly driven by the defendant collided with him, throwing him into the air and causing massive injuries from which he died some weeks later. The driver failed to stop and drove off, despite a blown tyre. He was traced to a friend's house a couple of hours later, where he claimed to have drunk a quantity of vodka. The case was going to be complicated, because an expert would be called on each side to deal with the post-accident consumption and the back-count of the alcohol reading.
We were astonished to learn that the CPS prosecutor had been booked for just half a day, and was due at Crown Court after lunch. So we went part-heard and reassembled ten days later. The CPS sent a different prosecutor, who had never even seen the file, so we re-adjourned. We didn't finish the case on Day 3, so we went part-heard yet again. On Day 4 we finally retired to consider our verdict, although it was late afternoon - we were determined to finish it. We were out for three hours, during which I became so frustrated that I decided to remain silent while pacing up and down the carpet, to give my colleagues a chance to get their thoughts together. They did not. The chairman made no attempt to lead or focus the discussion and my other colleague was pathetically indecisive. To be fair to the chairman, it turned out that she was suffering from a terminal illness, and she died a few weeks later. Our verdict was illogical (guilty on one charge, not on the other) and our sentence was a dog's breakfast of a partly-suspended prison sentence. It was later (rightly) overturned on appeal.
Everything went wrong. Weak chairmanship. Poor decision-making outside. Dreadful CPS case management. An insufficiently assertive clerk. Oh yes, and police evidence that had clearly been given a bit of a nudge in the 'right' direction, nearly blowing the whole thing out of the water (our man did not deny being the driver).

Could it happen again today? No, I don't believe it could. Chairmen are properly trained, and appraised every three years. Wingers too are trained and appraised regularly. Clerks are much better trained. The defendant was under-charged; today he would be before the Crown Court for causing death by careless while over the alcohol limit. On conviction he would face some years in prison. We woefully under-sentenced.
The result was unjust, made worse by the fact that the deceased man's family were in the gallery for much of the time. God knows what they made of it, poor sods.

Further and Better Particulars

Thanks to regular contributor Peter Hargreaves for pointing us to this article by the estimable Joshua Rozenberg, that neatly summarises the position underlying the currrent brouhaha over bail.

Shock Revelations

The Office for National Statistics has reported that well-off people drink more alcohol than poor ones, and that men drink more than women.

A future project will investigate whether the comfortable middle classes are more likely to drive Mercedes-Benz cars and to live in large houses than the poorer members of society.

A spokesman for His Holiness the Pope has confirmed that the Pontiff remains committed to the Roman Catholic Church.

The US National Parks Service reports that its Rangers continue to find faeces deposited by Ursus arctos horribilis in its forests.

From The Times

Tragedies ‘warping government policy’

Government policy is often badly formed because it is drawn up in response to tragedies and problems, the Government’s new head of risk management has said.

Rick Haythornthwaite, head of the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council, said that policy was often affected by pressure from an aggressive media and a confrontational Parliament. “We have got to deal with some of the systemic flaws in policy-making within Whitehall,” he said.

He told The Politics Show on BBC One that calls to protect the public sapped self-reliance, resilience and the spirit of adventure. Some risk could be a very good thing, he said

Quite.

I Wonder How This Will Go Down In The Canteen

This Times Columnist has an interesting take on current problems with public order. See Article

Hard Cases Make Bad Law (no. 86)

The Sun issues another of its clarion calls for 'Justice' today.
Blessed as they are by the luxury of not having to make any decisions, but having freedom to criticise those taken by others, they seem to be calling for the abolition, or perhaps limiting, of the right to bail laid down in the Bail Act.
Perhaps some future leader column will address the consequences of doing that - don't hold your breath though.

Later:a few facts from the JCO.

Later Still:
The Bail Guidelines are on Section 1 Page 21 of the Bench Book

There But For The Grace of God......

This horrible story is a reminder of the awesome responsibility involved in granting or refusing bail. The Bail Act prescribes the right to bail, unless there are fears of the defendant absconding, committing further offences, or interfering with witnesses. In this case the Judge (and it could have been a magistrate or magistrates) dealt with the fear of failure to surrender by imposing a whopping surety of £200,000. Now two more people are dead, the judge and prosecutors having had no way of looking into the mind of the man involved.
There is no reason to criticise the judge or magistrate involved in a case like this. Locking up an unconvicted person should only be done for very good reason. As it turned out, this one went wrong in a way that may not have been forseeable.
Many magistrates will be faced with difficult bail decisions tomorrow. They will follow the law, but they will also need just a bit of luck to get it right.

Later:- here is a blinding flash of the obvious. The early panic reaction of MoJ people who saw the headlines proves that many of them do not have a clue what an independent judiciary is there for, and think that the correct response to a story such as this one is to drop heavy hints about leaning on the judge.