HAMLYN - College of Social Sciences and International Studies ...

Criminal Justice
because they are deemed to have more important business
elsewhere. Recent Home Office research based on a sample of
50,000 persons summoned for jury duty has shown for the first
time how few of those summoned for jury service actually
serve. 13 per cent were ineligible, disqualified or excused as of
right. (There is a strong case for drastically paring down these
categories of exclusion so that more or less everyone is liable for
jury duty, as is increasingly the case in the United States.) No
less than 38 per cent of the sample were excused, typically on
medical grounds or because of care of young children or elderly
relatives or because they said they could not afford time off
work. 15 per cent just failed to attend—in half those cases
because the summons never reached them. That left 34 per cent.
Of those, half had their jury duty deferred, usually because of
work or holiday commitments and many later got a further
deferral or were excused. 3 ? Next year the task of handling
selection and summoning of juries is to be taken away from
local courts and given to a new national clearing house in
London. Maybe that will lead to tightening up the system.
The Home Office study may appear to support the widely
held belief that jurors are not representative of the whole
population, but the biggest study to date of the composition of
the jury, carried out in 1993, suggested otherwise. Based on
returns from a random national sample of over 7,500 jurors it
showed that the socio-economic composition of English juries
was remarkably close to the make-up of the general
population. 38
The Runciman Royal Commission was persuaded by the
Commission for Racial Equality that in racially sensitive cases
the judge should have the power to authorise a special procedure
to achieve that the jury contain up to three members of
the ethnic minority community. The jury bailiff would be
instructed to draw names randomly until three such people
were drawn. Lord Taylor, the then Lord Chief Justice, opposed
the recommendation. In a speech to the Leeds Race Issues
Advisory Council he said:
"Though put forward for the best of motives, this proposal seems to
me the thin edge of a particularly insidious wedge. The jury is the
37 J. Airs and A. Shaw, "Jury Excusal and Deferral", (Home Office Research
Findings, No. 102, November 1999).
38 Crown Court Study, op. cit., n. 36 above, ss. 8.13.3-8.13.6. The study was based
on returns from 7,694 jurors in 757 trials—a response rate of 85 per cent.
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