Public Justice?

7th October, David Leigh

Just how much do we know about what takes place in our name in the criminal courts? How much do we care? It is a fundamental principle of the English legal system that criminal proceedings should take place in public. Courts should have a public gallery to enable any ordinary Joe to sit and follow what is going on. The press is entitled to report court proceedings without fear of action for defamation provided the report is accurate and contemporaneous. But do the public ever visit courts? Do the press actually report court proceedings? By and large the answer increasingly is no. 

The national press is no longer interested. Every national newspaper used to have at least one reporter at the Old Bailey. The Press Association had seven. Other news agencies had their own staff there full time. The papers themselves now have none, the Press Association, two. At the Old Bailey there can be up to a dozen murder trials ongoing at any one time. Almost none of them are reported. Violence and corruption, fraud and incompetence are exposed on a daily basis but no one other than those immediately involved will ever know. Locally the Leicester Mercury and the Loughborough Echo used to have at least one reporter each at every court sitting. Now you rarely see a reporter from one month’s end to the next. The Echo publishes a list of court results obtained, one assumes, over the phone, a practice which would not have pleased the old school court reporters.

 The press argue that people are no longer interested in hard news. They want lifestyle journalism, celebrity gossip. You only need look at the stories that get the most hits on news websites. Duncan Campbell, the Guardian's long-time crime correspondent, who retired last year after four decades in journalism, says: "Nowadays you get much more homogenous news with all the media chasing the same stories. Most newspapers, and the BBC and others, have websites and they can see from the number of hits a story gets what is popular. You will find a story about Wayne Rooney or Kate Moss will be massively hit, which you will not necessarily get from an interesting story with nobody famous in it." Campbell says crime coverage has been one of the biggest casualties, with newspapers and broadcasters massively downsizing their teams. It is interesting to note that this has done nothing to arrest the steady decline in newspaper circulation. 

Members of the public who want to go and see for themselves fare little better. The public gallery in the main criminal court in Loughborough’s new £15million courthouse consists of two rows of seats several of which are already broken. The public area is cut off completely from the court by a solid wood and glass screen. The court proceedings are relayed through speakers connected to microphones which are frequently switched off or are nowhere near the person who is speaking. The result is a poorly ventilated claustrophobic space from which it is possible to see little and to hear even less. It is no surprise that no member of the general public has yet been seen attempting to clamber over the solicitors and occasional police officers sitting at the ends of the two rows of seats. What such a member of the public who chose to do so might make of the court proceedings is a matter for another day.

So are the activities of the Loughborough Magistrates Court really carried on in the name of the people of Loughborough? Or have they fallen into the hands of micro managing, box ticking civil servants who would prefer the public to keep their noses out? Does it matter one way or the other? Pop down to Pinfold Gate sometime and you can make up your own mind. After all it is a public court. If you can’t make head or tail of it, there is invariably a solicitor there from Straw and Pearce who, if they have a spare moment, will be happy to point the way through the labyrinth.