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I support the jury system as I support democracy: it is the worst system of justice around, except for all the others. My own experience of serving on a jury was inspiring in some ways, frustrating in others. The current Labour government wants to abolish them for all but the most serious cases. Assuming Sir Keir Starmer and Mr David Lammy MP are sincere in their claim that all they want to do is speed up justice, are there any better ways to do that than denying the accused their ancient right to a jury of their peers?

David Friedman was recently summoned to present himself for jury service in the US. He seems to have been sent home without ever reaching the jury-box. I have the impression that the the American courts turn away a higher percentage of those called to jury service than the UK courts do, and also that they make much more of a fuss about excluding jurors who might be biased, which over there often seems to mean in effect excluding jurors who might be intelligent. Despite this and many other differences between the two systems, not all of which favour the UK, I think that Professor Friedman’s observations on the careless way in which jurors’ time was wasted might be relevant to us here. The underlying reason Friedman and his fellow jurors (or whatever the word is for people who are called to be jurors but are not chosen) got to know every crack in the courthouse wall was that the people who have power to speed up or slow down cases pay next to nothing for the jurors’ time. Friedman writes:

What most struck me, as an economist, about the process was the implication of its having access to nearly free labor — there was no payment for the first day, fifteen dollars a day thereafter. The courthouse was towards the south end of the county, about half an hour’s drive from me, forty-five minutes from the north end. We were told that the jurors were selected at random, with no attempt to select jurors for cases in the south courthouse from the south end of the county — because doing that would have biased the selection, how was not explained.

Out of more than eighty of us called in only about twenty-one were put through the voir dire process. The rest were presumably there in case more were eliminated, but it is hard to see how that could justify calling in that many. A jury system that took the value of our time seriously could have called in half as many, perhaps fewer, and, if that occasionally turned out not to be sufficient, additional candidates the next day. By the end of the first day they knew that they had most of the jurors they needed, could have saved most of the rest of us the time and the trip.

Further evidence is how our time in the courthouse was used. We arrived the first day by nine, were sent home at four, a total of seven hours on site. Of those seven hours we spent most of an hour waiting to be told what room we were to go to, an hour and a half for lunch, two hour long breaks. We were actually involved in the jury selection process for less than three hours out of seven.

That again looks like a result of treating our time as a free good, but I do not know enough about what else was happening to be certain. Running a trial, even the preliminaries to a trial, involves coordinating the activity of multiple people: juror candidates, the judge, the attorneys, perhaps others. My guess is that if the county had to pay a market rate for our time they would have found a schedule that used it more efficiently but I could be wrong.

I have so far interpreted what I observed as evidence that the people responsible did not care how much of our time was spent in the process, since our attendance was compulsory and the price paid for it low, on the first day zero, but there is another possible interpretation of the evidence.

→ Continue reading: Want to save money on jury trials? Try paying jurors!