‘The hotchpotch of measures that comprises the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill is about to reach Report Stage in the House of Lords. The Bill sets out a panoply of new and controversial measures to deal with dangerous offenders, young offenders, drugs-testing in prisons, wilful neglect or ill-treatment by care workers, reforms to criminal proceedings (including the use of cautions), the possession of extreme pornographic images, civil proceedings involving judicial review (B. Jaffey & T. Hickman), personal injury cases and challenges to planning decisions. The adequacy of this miscellaneous approach to law reform will doubtless come under the fuller scrutiny that it deserves elsewhere. This blog takes as its focus provisions in Part 3 of the Bill which seeks to put on a statutory footing offences connected with private research by jurors. I suggest that resort to the criminal law constitutes a clumsy, impractical and unnecessarily punitive attempt to regulate the extra-curial activities of the modern, online juror. It is incumbent on our lawmakers to explore more imaginative responses to the undoubted problem of jurors’ access to untested, internet materials – responses that might be more obviously premised upon an appreciation of jurors’ dutiful efforts to arrive at just verdicts.’

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UK Constitutional Law Association, 2nd October 2014

Source: www.ukconstitutionallaw.org/blog