Thread by @BarristerSecret

Here is a list of reasons why some of my hearings and trials this year have been delayed and kicked off into the long grass, stuck in our record court backlog. Serious allegations which will now be tried *years* after the event. 🧵👇

1. The defendant not being produced at court from prison. 🚚

A classic. It happens due to the private contractors simply not bothering, knowing that the contracts negotiated by government include no meaningful penalty for failure.

Trials every day in every court are affected.

2. The court forgetting to book an interpreter for a defendant.

Another perennial. Every day in every court building.

See also: the court booking an interpreter, and the interpreter just not turning up.

3. The Witness Care Unit forgetting to tell witnesses to attend trial. Meaning the whole trial has to be adjourned.

4. Judge having extra hearings shoved into their courtrooms during a trial, meaning that the trial overruns. Or, if the trial cannot overrun - because jurors or the judge have immovable commitments - the trial collapses and is adjourned for a year or two.

5. The Crown Prosecution Service failing to serve key evidence or critical disclosure until the day of trial, giving insufficient time for the defence to consider it, and causing the trial to be adjourned.

6. The nationwide breakdown of the Crown Court Digital Case System and/or Common Platform.

Happens pretty much weekly. All cases are now digital. When the abysmal infrastructure (which has been in Beta for years) freezes or breaks, everything grinds to a standstill.

7. The ancient court plumbing giving up, meaning no running water or flushing toilets, meaning everybody is sent home.

8. A lift being broken (lying unfixed for weeks because no engineer can be found/afforded), meaning that a disabled witness cannot attend a trial.

9. Queues to enter the court building taking over an hour, due to insufficient numbers of security staff to conduct the on-the-door checks. Meaning jurors, witnesses, interpreters and defendants are stuck outside the building while the hours tick by.

10. Not enough barristers to cover cases. Often - especially in serious, specialised and difficult work such as Rape and Serious Sexual Offences - the CPS will not be able to find an available barrister, due to so many having quit. lawgazette.co.uk/news/barrister…

11. One court I visited had a hole in the roof for six months. Water was pouring through and the whole ground floor was covered in tarpaulin. Flooded courtrooms are not, you will be surprised to hear, particularly usable. No contractor could be found to fix it.

12. The prison forgetting to bring a defendant to the video-link booth for a court video hearing, and having insufficient staff/inclination to, y’know, go and fetch him.

13. The abysmal system for pre-recording cross-examinations of vulnerable witnesses (up until this year supplied by Vodafone) crashing, freezing and even failing to record.

plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-…

14. The government artificially restricting court “sitting days” - effectively closing perfectly usable courtrooms and forcing judges to stay at home, to make a tiny saving on court staff.

This happened regularly under the last government. The new lot are still doing it.

This is off the top of my head.

These sorts of inefficiencies happen on quite literally a daily basis. Everybody in the system knows this. Everyone.

Yet what is the government’s diagnosis?

“Juries. They are the problem. Get rid of juries.”

It is absolutely mind-boggling.