[Cycloid]

Time and again on Road CC we hear of drivers walking free from court, or receiving a minimal judgement, after causing death or serious injury to a cyclist.

Naturally the cycling community feels incensed, but we can hardly claim to be impartial onlookers and the greater good must be considered. However if a judicial system is not seen to be Fair, Impartial, and Equally Accessible to all then citizens will lose confidence in it.

Part of the problem must lie in our adversarial system in which one side (the prosecution) paints defendants in the worst possible light whilst the other side (the defence) looks for extenuating circumstances and makes them appear as saints, even if they are pleading guilty. A good lawyer may convince a Jury / Judge of the defendant’s character, and we get a miscarriage of justice. If you can afford a good lawyer (Mr Loophole springs to mind) you may well come out with a more lenient judgement.

Is our adversarial justice system robust, but with occasional shortcomings?

Would we be better served by an Inquisitorial system (as in France) in which the judge gets involved with the case?

Topic

[BalladOfStruth]

The problem IMO, isn’t that

The problem IMO, isn’t that the adversarial system isn’t fair, it’s just that there’s a demonstrable issue with the acceptance of/attitude towards specifically road crime among the pool of people the the jury is drawn from. We have reams of studies and statistics available to us that show how bad the average driver is regarding things like speed compliance, KSI blame, mobile phone use, etc – nearly everyone drives, nearly everyone drives badly, and that’s where your jury comes from.

If you have a driver in the dock because they were driving too quick, texting on their phone and ended up killing a cyclist. The jury is going to be full of people that often drive too quick, often use their mobile phones and have been taught by the media to hate cyclists (this also goes for the Judge, Barristers. etc). So, what’s going to happen? They’re going to be massively sympathetic to the driver. This is why fully concious/intentional acts (like ipurposely ramming a cyclist in a fit of rage) are often downgraded from “dangerous” to “careless” driving, because they know you’d never get a jury of sympathetic drivers (who probably would have done the same thing if they were in a similar situation) to convict.

We don’t put murderers on trial in front of a jury of murderers. We don’t put burglars on trial in front of a jury of burglars, but we absolutely put dangerous drivers on trial in front of a jury of drivers who probably do the same shit day-in, day-out and haven’t gotten “unlucky” yet.

[the little onion]

Given that anti-cyclist

Given that anti-cyclist hatred and prejudice is rife in the media and public discourse, I’d say that there is a major problem with trial by jury in incidents when a driver has harmed cyclists. I’d go so far as to compare it to trials in southern states of the US in the 1950s, when all-white juries would never convict a white person of violence towards a black person. 

[hawkinspeter]

For driving offences, they

For driving offences, they need to bring in a driving test examiner to give his expert opinion on whether the driving involved would be an instant fail on a driving test. Then the judge needs to emphasise that the driving test standard is the minimum standard required for a careful driver and the jury needs to give their verdict accordingly.

However, judges and magistrates are also a problem when they give laughable sentences – there needs to be a review of traffic offences and sentencing guidelines. Hold on a minute, I think that was announced by the Tories about a decade ago…

[Secret_squirrel]

The problem is you fail to

The problem is you fail to explain how an inquisitorial system would be any better. 
 

The major problem with the justice system as it pertains to road crime is a inclination to see holding a drivers license as a right AND and inclination for lower tier judges to sentence “accident” drivers with leiniency. 
 

Neither of those are solved by a inquisitorial system.  They both need a review of sentencing guidelines followed by aggressive monitoring of the judges handing out the sentence perhaps via extending the unduly lenient sentencing scheme to Road crime. 

[Ride On]

Nobody does…
Nobody does…

[chrisonabike]

cycloid wrote:

cycloid wrote:

However if a judicial system is not seen to be Fair, Impartial, and Equally Accessible to all then citizens will lose confidence in it.

Probably getting a little cynical but I suspect most have little interest in the system because they have little interaction with it.

To a certain extent having confidence is irrelevant.  Especially if you feel if a system is uninterested in you or even against you.  I didn’t hire any of the the judges, lawyers, police etc. and only pay a tiny fraction of their wages personally…

Like the form of democracy we have – it’s a “best of the worst” I reckon.  The “investigative judges” system will have different pros and cons.  I suspect transporting a whole new system here “wouldn’t work”.  In a different environment without the usual checks and balances to maintain the system (which it has where it evolved) it might fail badly.

Anyway – what about “justice for cyclists”?  You can see this as “prejudice against an out group”.  I think the simplest explanation may be “motornormativity” plus two bits of psychology: we don’t need to understand details of things to do them and we can be almost totally blind to things we don’t have direct experience of.

[Cugel]

There are many conditions

There are many conditions underpinning injustice. Two of huge significance and effects are:

* Many widely avaialble manufactured things and “services” encourage, induce and even enforce nasty behaviours that segue from nasty to criminal. Cars made to speed and be driven aggresively are an example of the former; gambling is an example of the latter. There are hundreds more-such in our consumer-producer hegemony, which itself in a huge encourager of nasty >>>> criminal behaviours.

* Social conditions are arranged primarily for the benefit of a tiny cabal of what used to be called aristocrats – those with the power and wealth to arrange conditions as they wish, which conditions are often a zero-sum game that degrade vast sections of a nation’s populace. The degraded conditions produce degraded behaviours, resulting in both illegal criminal acts and what might be called legalised “criminal” acts.

These two massive pressures on the justice “system” are growing by the day. For many, there is no effective justice system anymore. This suits criminal behaviour, which is even now becoming just normal behaviour.

[Tom_77]

I’d recommend reading Stories

I’d recommend reading Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken by The Secret Barrister.

I think the problem is not that we have an adversarial system, it’s that all parts of the system (police, CPS, lawyers, courts) are massively underfunded. Trying to do justice on the cheap will result in a mess no matter what system you have.

[mark1a]

cycloid wrote:

cycloid wrote:

Would we be better served by an Inquisitorial system…

I wasn’t expecting that…

[Author]

Replies