BRITISH JUSTICE - BLACK DEFENDANTS VERSUS ALL WHITE JURY, PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES EQUAL MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE. THE END.

Another essential component of any credible reforming of the criminal justice system, should be the principle avoiding using the incarceration of the convicted person as a punishment, unless it is properly assessed as being needed to avoid a high likelihood of reoffending and harm to members of the public. This approach would require more use or more use to be made of 'house or home detention' of the convicted person, and electronic tracking and monitoring, as well as the usage of other community-oriented measures.

After all, we are now living in the 21st Century, where computers and the micro chip are kings. So, why this continuing reliance on punishing humans by caging them and treating the even more cruelly than probably most livestock, including those which are reared in production 'batteries'?

With the prison industry not, nor is ever likely to make the people it brutalises better than how they went into it, the only or biggest rationale for maintaining it, is to brutalise and dehumanise those who are subjected to it. As well as providing jobs and profits for those who own or work in it. It achieves little else, and it is time the so-called civilised societies stop throwing money at a system which mostly destroys lives and increase the incidence of crimes.

Similarly, the issue of  the quality and standard of the evidence which jurors use to convict defendants in criminal cases needs further and urgent attention. The issue of what constitutes 'evidence' and 'proof' needs to be examined. 

Is it an account of the offence which the complainant is alleging the defendant committed, irrespective of whether there is any objective and tangible proof of the offence having been committed, in the first place, and, secondly, by the alleged defendant? 

Is the jury being asked to decide whether they should believe the account of the complainant or the defendant, but without any tangible proof of the offence being committed, and, if so, can a jury really find against the defendant to the standard of meeting the criteria of 'beyond reasonable doubt'?  

If so, could such a jury demonstrate how they have accomplished such a miraculous feat, without simply resorting to the 'what the complainant and the state have said seem more credible'? Probably also 'based on what we know about people who commit these kind of offences', and 'something must have happened, etc, etc.?' 

If you follow that line of reasoning, you can see how the prejudices which are within any society, the stereotypical views, can easily invade the jurors deliberations; unless systemic care is taken to prevent it from occurring.

A man or woman might break into a person's home or shop and steals from them, and the law requires more than their personal account of who robbed them. It requires corroborative evidence.
Yet, a person is accused of, say raping or otherwise sexually offending against another person, and the law then says it requires no other corroborative evidence that the defendant has committed the alleged crime. How can this be a judicious approach to determining guilt, 'beyond reasonable doubt'? 

Without corroborative evidence, it is not possible to demonstrably prove that the defendant is guilty (not innocence, since the presumption is, or should be that of 'being innocent until proven guilty) of the alleged offence/s, and any conviction has to be considered risky.

It might also prove beneficial to consider whether more use should be made of judges considering a defendants guilt, rather than continuing to share this onerous task with 12 jurors, some of whom might not be up to the challenge.

Although it is not to say a complainant's account of an alleged offence is never true, convicting a person based on the jury having to decide whose 'story or account' to believe, without tangible evidence that an offence had been committed and committed by the defendant, is unsafe.

Finally, there is a case, in my opinion, for the deliberations of jurors to be audio, if not video recorded. So that there can be some oversight into how the jurors came to their conclusion after their deliberations, and whether any of them have behaved inappropriately in doing so, such as, e.g., drawn any adverse conclusion or inferences about the absence or presence of family members and friends, the demeanour of the defendant and witnesses, etc.

We need criminal justice systems which are  more sophisticated and humane than these we now have. Criminal justice systems which have a higher probability of delivering justice to be both the accused and the the complainant.  And where guilt has been determined by both witnesses accounts and corroborative supporting evidence, meet the principles of restorative, rehabilitative, retributive and, deterrential justice, where appropriate, without debasing and dehumanising the defendants and convicted persons. 

A criminal justice system which is fit for Twenty-First Century humans, and not one which belongs to the 10th Century. It is time to have a much more aspirational and enlightened approach towards the perennial issue or problem of 'crime and punishment', and focus more on preventing crime and effectively achieve rehabilitation. 

If we continue to fail to do so, the kind of criminality which has become so ineradicably a feature of countries such as America, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, et al, will become more widespread. It makes no sense locking people up and leaving them to fend for themselves like wild animals. That is a devolutionary solution, when what is required is an enlightened and aspirational one.