Delegalised
When I was 10, I had three burning ambitions: 1) to be the best horseback rider, ever 2) to live in the Beverly Hillbillies’ house with this really cute guy named Ben who was on this TV show that nobody else ever wanted to watch but I did because it had horses in it, plus they were being ridden by the really cute guy with curly hair and 3) to be the next F. Lee Bailey.
A few years later, my obsession with horses was being gradually replaced by other less pastoral obsessions, that TV show had long been cancelled and so had my love, but I continued to be insanely fascinated with courtroom drama, and dumb with admiration for the true-hearted men who dazzled and pleaded with juries that right might triumph – even if my hunger for justice would always go right out the window if the outlaw in the movie/TV show/book made me weak in the knees.
I still wanted to be the next F. Lee Bailey, but it was beginning to dawn on me that it had more to do with drama than any great devotion to the Law. And the dream finally died during my one and only time in court. Some guy had stolen my bike (which was really sad because it was a crappy bike), but got caught by my neighbour (which was annoying because he came by every day so I could thank him again for saving my crappy bike) and the two of us were called into court for the day.
I sat in that courtroom for hours and hours, watching a slow and sorry parade of dirt poor men and women being hauled in front of the judge for having stolen stockings from K-mart, being drunk and disorderly, homeless, sad, lost, rock bottomed… feeling all my illusions about the glamour of crime slip away.
Plus I never even got to testify: the guy confessed, got a warning and that was that.
But still I continue to be fascinated by courtroom drama, and always terribly aware of how jury trials seem to come down to who puts on the best show. John Mortimer of Rumpole fame once said that, if you can get a jury to laugh, you’re sure to win your case. I believe it. If you can effectively combine compelling argument with an appeal to raw human sentiment, it’s in the bag.
The other thing that always struck me about trials was the sense that, for a group of people with such power in their hands, the jury’s role in the process seems oddly passive. So I was absolutely fascinated to read Agnieszka Kolakowska’s account of her stint on jury duty in France, and especially this:
… This is perhaps the most immediately striking difference between French and Anglo-Saxon courts: the judge is also a juror, on an equal footing. He knows the dossier, directs the trial and, later, can enlighten the jury on points of law, but he deliberates and votes with them; he has one vote like everyone else, on both the verdict and the sentence. Or one might put it the other way round and say that the jury members are also judges. In the inquisitorial system, the trial – given that the investigation is complete and all the facts are known – is mostly for the jury’s benefit: an occasion to present the facts to us rather than to establish them. If at any point during the trial we want to question the defendant, or a witness, or an expert witness, we pass the judge a note and he will allow us to do so, or (more commonly) ask the question for us; notes flew back and forth during both my trials.
[…] Swarms of lawyers don’t buzz around menacingly during the pre-trial investigation; witnesses – to whom there is supposed to be no access – are not coached until they no longer know what they are saying; juries don’t flounder in a morass of legal issues they don’t understand. And the process is swift: the investigation may take months or even years, but a murder trial can be concluded in three days.
[…] not only are previous convictions admissible in court, but all court appearances, even if they resulted in an acquittal, can be brought up. Thus we were told that our wife-murderer had dispatched his son in a very similar way (by stabbing him repeatedly in the back with a large knife) ten years before he decided to attack his wife: he was acquitted, on grounds of legitimate self-defence. Perhaps this happy outcome encouraged him in the belief that his luck would hold. If so, he was mistaken; we gave him 12 years.
F. Lee Bailey wouldn’t stand a chance. Rumpole maybe.
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Comment
- The French system sounds so sensible! Yet another reason to move there, as if I needed one. And I feel certain Rumpole would do just fine. I’d love to see him with a French accent!
— wizmo Oct 7, 2:04am #
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