It always seemed odd to me, the Jury. It never quite sat right with me. Everyday people with no real knowledge of the legal system kind of makes sense on the surface; appeal to common sense & common morality.

Each person goes through a vetting stage to make sure they're sound of mind and can be unbiased as possible, and are randomly selected per trial.

Again, always sounded good to me, but something at the back of my mind itched.

Then I came across this little data fact from research by the Ministry of Justice and I'll be honest, it scratched that itch immediately:

In the gargantuan 244 page report, it states:

These studies found that the race of the defendant may affect Black jurors’ judgements more
than it affects White jurors’ judgements, and found specifically that Black jurors exhibited
same-race leniency towards Black defendants and were more likely to rate White defendants
more harshly than Black defendants

Now there's details and questions you can think about all day here - This particular result can be found on page 182. But the point here is humans are human, and humans are tribal.

And there's no fiddling around with the details we can do to avoid that. Black people vote other black people innocent far more often. They vote white people guilty far more often. White people do not do this, in fact the opposite, possibly due to an insufferable feeling of white guilt.

And this is not to pick specifically on black folk, as it does say BME (black / minority ethnic), but I'm also sure in some regions where the jury is selected with a different culture of white folk, the shoe would be on the other foot.

My concern is even stronger when considering secular/religious division.

Let's say a Pakistani Muslim is on trial. Pakistanis stick together extremely strong, perhaps more than any other 'community' - don't get me started on the cost to the NHS as a result of their incestuous relationships. Since they stick together, the region in which the jurors are selected would be majority Pakistani too, so we would expect the jury to have a significant proportion of other Pakistani Muslims.

Well, what do you expect the results to be in this case? Completely fair, unbiased and based solely on the evidence presented? Gimme a break.

I'm not just being jaded, either. There are now multiple Members of Parliament in constituencies across the country who were voted in purely along religious lines in the UK. Their vote was due to the majority populations in the area being Muslim, and their focus was explicitly and openly about supporting Palestine. We know this, because when they won, their victory speech was simply about Palestine, and chanting about freeing palestine.

What on earth that has to do with fixing the roads and improving the recycling service, I have no idea. Because it didn't matter. They were voting, in the UK, on purely Islamic lines. This is what they do.

Decades or centuries ago, I have no doubt the English folk would have had a particular class bias. Perhaps as simple as favouring your own class (working/middle/upper) and discriminating against the others.

In the USA, It must surely be true that white people would have been racially charged enough for white people to just call black people guilty without so much as listening to a single scrap of evidence - there are, after all, plenty of stories of falsely accused black folk who ended up in the chair, their convictions only being overturned many years after their deaths.

And so what am I to take away from that?

It's outdated.

A jury, to me, seems like it may be most functional when taking place in a homogenous society. Not necessarily simply a skin colour thing although that's certainly a big factor. But religion and culture will also be playing a strong part in this. When the jury system came to be, that is how society was. 100% white English with the same heritage and customs, the same food, language and belief systems, and the same understanding of the law.

Now - FUN FACT - our jury doesn't even need to consist of citizens. All you need is the ability to vote and to have lived in the UK for 5 years.

This means people who were born and raised in Malawi,Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Jamaica, Poland, New Zealand, Uruguay, Spain, USA, Argentina, Hungary, and dozens more, can serve on our jury after hanging out for merely five years. They could have zero connection to our land or legal system, no ties of any kind. And they can just appear in our courts with their own country's legal systems in their mind, and make judgements based on that.

This seems absolutely mortifyingly wrong to me. People around the world simply do not share the same values as us. That's ok, for them. They can have their own values which we also do not share. But that is surely going to influence the outcome of our criminal justice system significantly.

As far as I'm aware, there are no other countries in this world that have the same broken allowances in place.

This is not just speculation either - this isn't a new phenomenon. in the 1960's, Singapore, one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world, found that their own judicial system simply couldn't function 'due to jurors choosing to convict or acquit based solely on ethnic prejudice rather than the facts of the case', and ultimately abolished it. You see, Singapore inherited the British legal system, a system divined in the British Isles for British homogenous society.

Singapore in the 1960s was marked by significant ethnic tensions, exemplified by the 1964 and 1969 race riots between Malay and Chinese communities. These riots highlighted deep-seated ethnic divisions, raising concerns about whether juries could remain impartial in a multi-ethnic society

Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister at the time, is said to have used this to his advantage when he was a criminal defense lawyer, stirring hatred against white people to get an acquittal on his clients, four Malayians accused of killing a Royal Air Force Officer and his family.

It was the guilt of his actions here that convinced him that, in the context of a very diverse Singapore, this form of judicial system simply could not work.

Well, the UK is now and will forever increasingly be, a multi-ethnic, highly diverse nation. Even as recently as the 90's, we were about 95% ethnically white. Now that number is down to the 70%'s. London is closer to 35%.

We are not the same country, and we will never be the same country again. The justice system needs to adapt accordingly, or we are going to see, more and more, very clearly guilty criminals of one tribe getting away with their crimes, and clearly innocent people of 'the other tribe' being convicted unjustly.

There's a case to be made in numerous trials in the US that it's already happening over there. But I've already made my point pretty clear, I reckon.

FIX IT!