Sir, In your law report on Regina v Twomey and others (June 25), the Court of Appeal decided that the right to a fair (criminal) trial is not prejudiced by dispensing with a jury, where there is a very significant danger of jury tampering.

If this is the case, one wonders why we bother with trial by jury in the first place: if a fair trial is not prejudiced when there is a danger of jury tampering, in logic there should be no prejudice when no such danger exists. The end result is the same, trial by a judge alone.

Given the perverse verdicts of juries in recent years (eg, Regina v George, the Jill Dando murder trial), many defendants may indeed feel that they are in safer hands with a judge sitting alone. However, that is not the point. Criminal jurisprudence in England has embraced for centuries the concept of jury service as a prerequisite of fairness and justice, and it ill becomes the Court of Appeal to contradict the principle as glibly as it did in this case.

In reaching its decision, the court should have accepted that the prospects of a fair trial would be diminished by removing the jury, but made it clear that the decision had been forced on it by legislation passed by a government that appears, in this regard and many others, to have a questionable approach to avoiding a miscarriage of justice.

Another stark example of this attitude is the recently granted right of the prosecution to apply to have a defendant’s previous convictions placed before the jury. Criminal cases should be proved by presenting evidence relating to the alleged offence that proves guilt, unassisted by unrelated material prejudicial to the defendant. The dangers of miscarriage of justice can easily be illustrated by considering the position of a defendant with previous convictions, who is in fact innocent. He must be in danger of wrongful conviction to a greater extent than a defendant with no such convictions. If not, there would be no point from the legislator’s point of view in revealing the convictions.

Iain Macmaster

London NW8

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