Salocin

According to the BBC, the record will only be revealed if the defendant has prior convictions regarding the kidnapping or sexual abuse of a child. Which, in some ways, I can understand and support, even if at the same time, a part of me thinks that once that information is revealed, the defendant has no hope of ever being found "not guilty", which, if he was, puts a whole new wrench into the monkey works.

Hi Helen!

I'm also glad that the revelations are limited in scope in this way.

I think that we underestimate juries often as a consequence of having watched too many televised renditions of trials. We believe that the lawyer is all-powerful and juries are dupes to be manipulated as the lawyers see fit, and that this new evidence will therefore have a disproportionate impact.

Perhaps I am an optimist, or to be more brutal, naive, but I like to think that juries will not be so quick to condemn someone based on a prior record without significant additional evidence to support the case. Of course I can't be sure, because I don't really know all that much about how juries think (not being eligible for jury duty anywhere myself as a consequence of being a foreigner everywhere), but if we can't put our faith in our peers, even if our cynicism encourages us to distrust all others, then we are in dark times indeed, and I prefer to be an optimist (naive?) and suffer for it than to surrender to that vision of the world.

The design of the process of law has always been a tradeoff between finding the guilty innocent or the innocent guilty, and there's no pleasant answer to that conundrum.

Thanks for dropping by.

Nicolas.

I generally agree with you, as I am naive, too, but I think in cases that concern children, the juries aren't going to be so forgiving. There have been a spate of brutal crimes against children here in England recently, and it certainly is, I feel anyway, going to impact a jury with regards to how they see the defendant.

Again, I have to say-I am terribly opinionated, but I haven't yet figured out how I feel about this reverse in law. You have very nicely summed it up though.

The big deal is this:

IT'S IRRELEVANT!

For each individual court case, the defendant must be found guilty beyond reasonable doubt on the strength of the evidence placed before the court. Not past record, but specific evidence for that crime.

You are certainly an optimist. Juries are made up of a below average intelligence cross section of society (since most professionals find a way to dodge jury duty)... the same people who on occasion attack paediatricians, the same people who read the Sun and the Mail who as we all know are big on the virtues of forgiveness for past sins.

This is a bad idea. However, I could imagine some change to the law where the defendant's history were allowed if it highlighted some untruth in his/her defence.

It's not irrelevant. Even if jurors are told to focus only on the supposed crime at hand they will still be aware of a past record, if only on a sub-concious level.

I thought that the whole idea was people doing their time are being found guilty of a crime, hence being punished for what they may have done in the past and walking as a free citizen again.

If jury's are being read past discretions than it doesn't seem as if they have completely paid for their crime in the eyes of the community.

That's all very nice, but it ignores the statistical fact that in the case of the crimes in question, repeat offending is a statistical likelihood.

Perhaps you believe that evidence should be limited to physical evidence, as Incandenza suggests, but that would rule out any defendant calling character witnesses in their defense, and we know that's done all the time. If that is allowable, then why not other facts such as past guilty verdicts?

We know that repeat child offenders are likely to repeat some more. That doesn't mean that they are guilty of every crime they are accused of, but it does mean that this is a piece of information that might tip us from just below the threshold of reasonable doubt to just above. The defendant has a very great many ways of casting doubt on a perception of the facts, regardless of whether they were there or not, simply by throwing mud at witnesses that rarely needs to be substantiated, this is a reflection of the law's paranoia of putting innocent people in prison. I simply believe that perhaps society should move a small (repeat: small) way along that tradeoff towards making it harder for guilty people to cast doubt on the facts by bringing their past (and therefore, to my mind, relevant) record into it. Especially for these types of offenses.

Just because they did this once is unlikely to convince a jury without significant additional evidence. Someone who has raped a dozen children in the past 10 years, claiming each time that they were innocent... well to my mind, that forms a pattern, and if we don't take that into account, perhaps we're ignoring something important because of our paranoia to be perceived as just.

There's no relation between this and labelling every past offender as a social pariah, which of course I would be totally against. (Not that they're not doing it in the case of sex offenders).