The appellant challenged the judge’s refusal to accede to an application to swear in a multi-racial jury.
Held: The judge was right in coming to the conclusion that he should not order a multi-racial jury to be empanelled. He had no power to do so. Lord Lane said: ‘The whole essence of the jury system is random selection.’
The trial judge had no discretion: ‘to discharge a competent juror or jurors in an attempt to secure a jury drawn from particular sections of the community, or otherwise to influence the overall composition of the jury.’
and: ‘So far as the mode of summoning the panel is concerned, the judge is limited, we repeat, to considering, in a challenge for cause, whether the summoning officer has displayed bias or other impropriety. If that cannot be established, the judge has no power to review or take action in respect of any procedures that are alleged to have led to the panel not being in fact ‘random’. Any such complaint would be a complaint of administrative error and has to be tackled by means other than the judges action. If the officer is in fact not performing his duty properly, in circumstances that fall short of his displaying bias or impropriety, he must be corrected, in other words, by administrative means.
As emphasised above, action could certainly not take the form of directions by the judge as to how the task of selection should in fact be performed. That being the case, in the present instance, although the judge was not given the opportunity of argument on this point to any extent, he was right in the upshot to come to the conclusion that he should not order a multi-racial jury to be empanelled, because he had no power to do so.’
Lord Lane LCJ
[1989] 89 Cr App R 278
England and Wales
Citing:
Applied – Regina v Sheffield Crown Court ex parte Brownlow CA 1980
Two police officers were being brought to trial, charged with assault occasioning bodily harm. They applied to the trial judge for an order directing the prosecution to inform the defence whether any members of the jury panel had criminal . .
Cited by:
Cited – Regina v Tarrant CACD 18-Dec-1997
At a first trial it was suspected that a juror had been approached, and a retrial was ordered. The prosecutor applied to have the trial moved out of the area to avoid a repetition, but the judge directed instead that a jury protrection order be . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Practice
Updated: 19 January 2022; Ref: scu.450340
