Speedy Jury Selection : In England, Trials Quick and Efficient

The case against May Brock had taken eight months to come to trial. But then it moved swiftly.

There was no preliminary maneuvering. Jury selection took about five minutes. After a seven-hour trial, the jurors in the South London courtroom acquitted the young woman, who had been charged with check fraud.

The pace may seem brisk to Americans, but to the English it was routine. The American legal system has drawn much from its English counterpart but has failed to absorb its pragmatic courtroom efficiency.

Systems Compared

Overall, from indictment to disposition, criminal cases in both countries take up about the same length of time, recent studies show. But here the trial itself takes less time.

Barry Mahoney, an American who has spent two years studying criminal justice in England and Wales (Scotland has a separate system), said, “Once in court, they make better use of their time.” Mahoney is director of research for the Institute of Court Management of the National Center for State Courts in Denver and co-author of a recent report on the subject.

The speed of English courtroom justice has actually increased in recent years, despite a sharp rise in the crime rate. Government statistics show a reduction in the average trial from 9 hours and 15 minutes in 1979 to just over 8 hours in 1983.

Several factors contribute to the relatively accelerated pace of English courtroom justice. Lengthy pretrial procedures, common in many American states, are rare in England.

Speedy Jury Selection

Jury selection, for example, is quick. American trial lawyers have refined this process to a time-consuming science, but here there are constraints and the first 12 prospective jurors through the door often end up as the jury.

Neither the prosecution nor the defense can question potential jurors, and the number of candidates they can reject without specific cause was reduced recently from seven to three.

“Picking a jury here requires about as much time as it takes 12 people to swear an oath,” said David Wurtzel, who was born in the United States but now wears the traditional robe and wig of an English barrister, or courtroom lawyer.

The English judiciary is inbred and clubby, and this has fostered a bond between judges and barristers that makes trials move quickly. There are only about 4,800 barristers, who appear in court; the other 44,000 lawyers are solicitors, who do not. Critics have called this division discriminatory, but a 1979 review of the English legal profession decided it was justified because the public benefits from having an expert group of trial lawyers.

Moreover, judges are chosen primarily from the ranks of the barristers, and this enhances the feeling of fraternity forged in London’s Inns of Court and surrounding chambers, where barristers have worked together and dined together for centuries.

“The bar fosters an all-chaps-together atmosphere that encourages a sense of duty to the public as well as to the client,” Wurtzel, the American-born barrister, said.

This sense of public obligation sometimes generates a degree of candor rarely in evidence among trial lawyers in the United States.

Not long ago, a senior barrister named Adrian Whitefield said after his client was convicted of killing five children, “There is nothing I can say which can mitigate the horror of the offenses.”

Law’s Spirit Emphasized

There is a tradition here of emphasizing the spirit rather than the letter of the law, and this has prevented many of the technical arguments that prolong cases in American courts. For example, if a suspect confesses before being informed of his legal rights (as required under both British and American law), an English judge can accept the confession as long as he believes that it was made voluntarily. An American court would be forced to ignore it, no matter how compelling or valid it might be.

There is a similar attitude toward the seizure of evidence. John Griffith, a professor of law at the London School of Economics, recalled a 1977 ruling that a police search was unlawful but that the evidence seized was admissible because it was of value to the case.

“There is a habit here to address things directly, and you don’t do this by excluding relevant evidence,” said James McGoldrick, head of Pepperdine University Law School’s semester-in-London program.

English judges also have broad discretionary powers in sentencing, and some are quick to exercise them, though it sometimes sets off a public outcry.

One judge recently sentenced to only a year in prison a man who admitted throwing his wife to her death from a building, citing the wife’s nagging as a mitigating factor. Another sent a man to prison for life for his part in a barroom brawl, even though no one had been killed.

‘Insulting to Women’

In London, a judge recently stirred controversy with his rulings in an unusual series of decisions. He found a rapist guilty, then awarded him $60,000 in damages for injuries received in a car crash he claimed had changed his personality, leading him to commit violent crimes, then gave only $11,000 and $15,000 in damages to the two women who had been raped. One of the women had had been stabbed and left for dead.

“Insulting to women,” the mass-circulation Daily Mirror trumpeted the next day in an editorial.

Social scientists contend that the swift, sometimes erratic nature of English justice has been accepted over the years in part because of the homogeneous nature of society. Selecting an unbiased jury, for example, is easier when a people share a similar heritage and values.

But there is also an inherent trust among the police, the judiciary and the public of a kind that does not exist in the United States.

“Judges here are comfortable with the police,” said Michael Zander, a professor of law at the London School of Economics. “They’ve never felt the need to be hamstrung by excluding evidence in the way of American judges. They are satisfied that the police have acted correctly.”

Cross Examination Error

Also, relations between police and the public have been strong historically. One of Britain’s most respected judges, Lord Denning, once observed that cross-examining a police witness was one of the worst tactical errors a defense lawyer could make.

“You would almost certainly lose your case, because the jury and almost everyone had great confidence in the police,” he said.

But times are changing in Britain, and social attitudes are changing with them. This places new strains on the judicial system.

Attitudes toward authority have changed, especially among younger people, who are serving as jurors in greater numbers since the property-holding requirement was waived. “Juries are less inclined to believe the police today than previously,” said Peter Ashman, senior legal officer of a legal rights group called Justice.

A measure of this attitude is the gradual increase in acquittal rates in jury trials during the past 30 years.

But the most serious challenge to the English judicial process comes from the growth of an ethnic minority that barely existed a generation ago. Immigrants who flooded into Britain from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean have given birth to a generation of young people who consider themselves British but question some aspects of the system.

Quiet Courtroom Clash

The clash of young urban blacks with authority, so dramatically visible in the streets of English cities last summer, is taking place more quietly in English courtrooms. Many of these young people have developed an adversary relationship with the police. Others, who do not understand the judicial system, are suspicious of the close ties among judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors.

In November, after a group of black youths in south London were sentenced to seven-year prison terms for the rape of two 16-year-old whites, black protesters stood outside the courtroom screaming, “white bastards, white justice,” voicing their opinion of the system as much as the sentence.

The characterization of “white justice” strikes a chord in a country where minorities make up 6% of the population but well under 1% of the police and are virtually unrepresented among barristers and judges.

At present, only one of the 350 judges serving in England and Wales is nonwhite, and the prospect for increasing this number soon is considered slim.

The unbending traditions of the Inns of Court, which have served English justice so well in the past, are formidable barriers to the change that some regard as vital. Scholarships have removed the economic burden that once restricted the legal profession to the sons and daughters of the wealthy. But other barriers continue to keep the Inns of Court beyond the reach of all but a few members of the country’s minority groups.

Minor-Case Justice

There is also disquiet at the magistrate level. For 800 years, volunteer, part-time lay judges, called magistrates, have dispensed summary justice in minor cases. Only a handful of the 26,000 magistrates, who are chosen by secret committees of local citizens, are from the minorities.

“We’ve tried to make the magistracy more representative, but it has been difficult,” said Geoffrey Norman, secretary of the Magistrates Assn. “Many don’t see it as something they feel comfortable doing.”

Norman said that discreet advertisements were placed last summer in ethnic magazines but that it is too early to assess their impact.

Britain’s senior legal figure, Lord Hailsham, the lord chancellor, has ruled out any affirmative action program in making judicial appointments. “No considerations of party politics, sex, religion or race must enter into my calculations (for appointments) and they do not,” he said last summer.

For now, at least, it does not seem likely that there will be any significant change. But there is growing belief that some form of adjustment is essential if the legal system is to continue to have the support of the people.

Thomas Sharpe, a professor of law at Oxford University who works closely here with the Los Angeles firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said: “Everything was fine as long as everyone agreed to play by the same rules, but we now have people living here who don’t accept the rules. Some change must come.”

Times research librarian Doug Conner contributed to this story.