Jury Trials
Debate between Luke Evans and David Davis(1 week ago)
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David Davis
I am losing the House, piece by piece, but that is okay. The Minister should pay some attention to the detail of the speech by the hon. Member for Chichester, because she made some extremely important points.
As for the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), he and I have fought together on some spectacular cases of miscarriage of justice—successfully, I think, in the biggest ones—but I do not agree with him that the Government’s policy does not address matters that are morally fundamental to the justice system, because the jury system is absolutely fundamental, for a few reasons that I will touch on in a minute.
The Minister has a difficult job. Bluntly, her Department—not just the Ministers, but the Department itself—has not done a very good job of managing the system over decades. The system failures have been serially spectacular, and I recommend that she look back at some of the National Audit Office reports. I commissioned one when I was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee; it is the longest NAO report that I can remember and the most complex, because these matters are systemically complex and do not lend themselves to off-the-cuff answers. She talks about modernisation, which is often important, but it should not be at the price of taking out the most important building block in our justice system—one that the rest of the world, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark said, has been copying for centuries.
Of course, the majority of the judiciary does not agree with restricting jury trials. When I raised this matter with the Justice Secretary—I think I did so in oral questions on one occasion—I asked him whether he had read the report by Mr Rivlin KC, which does a formidable job of forensically taking apart the Leveson recommendations. One of the points he makes is that Leveson is making judgments—quite properly, as a very distinguished judge of very long standing—but he is not making them on the basis of empirical data. There was very little empirical data behind what Lord Justice Leveson argued, and it is really important that we look at that. I recommend to the Minister that she read Mr Rivlin’s note. He was the head of Southwark Crown court, which has one of the highest throughputs in the country, and he put this point to all his judges. Not one of those working, active judges agreed with Leveson.
Implicit in Leveson’s comments, and certainly in what the Minister said, is an underlying idea that juries are not quite up to it in certain cases. It is suggested that they cannot quite cope, particularly in technical and financial cases. Well, I have handled about a dozen miscarriage of justice cases over the course of the last decade or two, and in not one of them was the jury the source of the error. More often than not, it was a misdirection by a judge or an error of the system, or the court case was allowed to get out of control in some way or another—I will come back to an example or two in a minute. It was pretty much always down to the judge, and sometimes to the lawyers in court, but not to the jury.
The risks involved in restricting jury trials are significant. When the Minister is modelling the numbers—she talks about the speed of the magistrate system—she should look at the appeal rates for magistrates’ decisions and the number of appeals in which the magistrates’ decisions are overturned.
Dr Evans
I refer the hon. Lady directly to the opening speech. If she sits and reads Hansard, it was very much different regarding that point.
I will move on to the other practical points we need to talk about—some even in the letter—about process. For example, the letter states:
“judges will assess the likely sentence in accordance with the Sentencing Guidelines. They will consider the facts of the case to make a determination of likely culpability, harm”—
and so on. It then goes on to say:
“eligibility is based on likely sentence length, any triable either-way offence could be in scope of the CCBD, if it were likely to receive a sentence of 3 years or less”.
What happens if the judge decides that they would not go to a jury trial? Later on, the same letter states:
“judges will retain the full sentencing powers available in the Crown Court, meaning there is no restriction on the sentence that can be handed down in the case.”
That points out the fact that a judge could make a decision at pre-hearing that the case need not go to trial because the sentence will be less than three years, and after that find out that the sentence will actually be five, six or seven years. There is a real discrepancy.
The letter also states:
“As you know, we do not have minimum sentences in law.”
That is demonstrably not true—think about drug trafficking, firearms or repeat knife offences. We only have to look at section 28 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, which talks about how using a knife for a second time will result in a minimum of six months. That was codified and updated in section 315 of the Sentencing Act 2020. The letter is filled with holes.
I thank Joanna Hardy-Susskind, who has pointed out a lot of these issues. She has done a lot of working explaining that the MOJ does not even understand the letters it is putting out in defence of this policy. If the Ministry was to release the modelling and the impact assessment, it could demonstrate to us all why we should make the change.
I am running short of time to talk about the practicality, so I will close where I started.
David Davis
I am not just standing to give my hon. Friend a minute. Does he agree with me that even if we accept what it says, being sent down for a couple of years can destroy a life?
Dr Evans
Absolutely. That is fundamental. There must be trust in the system and in the decision taken, and I worry that that is being eroded by this proposal.
I am going to change my speech. I started on the presumption that the Government are trying to solve an admin problem with a principled change, but I think, after listening to the Government Front Bench, that I am wrong. The Minister was asked, “Sarah, would you still go with this regardless of the backlog?” and the answer was yes. There we have it. It is clearer than ever before. Efficiency is the excuse and ideology is the aim. Regardless of the vote today, the answer is here for all to see that the Government do not believe in maintaining jury trial. For that reason, Members must stay and vote with the Opposition.
Ambassador to the United States
Debate between Luke Evans and David Davis(3 months, 4 weeks ago)
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David Davis
I agree—the hon. Member is right. Lord Mandelson’s continued support of Epstein shows an attitude that I find completely reprehensible in exactly that respect, because Epstein’s victims were women—young women, girls, children. So, yes, I do agree.
It has long been clear that Mandelson was not suitable to be our ambassador, so the question is: what changed last week? The Bloomberg emails revealing further details of Epstein’s relationship with him and the birthday book in which he referred to Epstein as his “best pal” were with Mandelson by Monday evening and with the Foreign Office overnight or by Tuesday morning at the latest. The Prime Minister is said to have known of the investigation by Tuesday afternoon, but not of the content of the emails. Why, when our most important diplomat in our most important international relationship is under question or under investigation, would the Prime Minister not want to know the details of the investigation immediately?
We understand that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was talking to Mandelson all day on Tuesday, so what was Mandelson saying to McSweeney and was this passed to the Prime Minister? One of the things I would ask the Minister is if, later on, he can give the House an undertaking that we can have a record of that conversation, because we need to know. Mandelson gave an immediate interview on Wednesday morning—hours before Prime Minister’s questions—admitting that more embarrassing revelations would come out. Mandelson’s past scandals and his links to Epstein were crystal clear by the time the Prime Minister rose to speak in PMQs last Wednesday.
Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)
Is my right hon. Friend aware that James Matthews, the Sky News reporter, cornered Lord Mandelson on 27 May to ask him specifically about staying in Epstein’s flat? Mandelson did not deny it, but simply said that he regretted having any connection with him. These are the kinds of questions that should have been asked, and were being asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) and many other Members back in May, about the suitability of the ambassador. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Prime Minister should have looked into this further at that point?
David Davis
Exactly, and in fact earlier than that point. I will come back to that when I talk briefly about the vetting process.
What precisely did the Prime Minister learn from reading the Bloomberg emails that was not already known about Lord Mandelson from public information and vetting done before the appointment? Each day that goes by, we see more shocking revelations not only about his misconduct and his links to Jeffrey Epstein, but about the failures of both the vetting process and the political judgment of those at the top of Government. I say to the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) that that relates not just to their political judgment, but to their moral standards and the equity in how they apply those moral standards across the board.
That brings us to the question: what happened to the vetting process? Most of what I have described was in the public domain. It does not take James Bond; Google could do this. What was not in the public domain was in the official records, or known to the intelligence agencies—in other words, it was all available to the Government. We know there was a two-page propriety and ethics briefing, which should have flagged concerns, but it merely triggered an unpenetrating email inquiry. That goes straight to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans), which is: where were the questions? Someone does not just send a three-line email and forget about it; they pursue the questions and cross-question the person under suspicion.