Okay, good evening, Hunt. This is Clive Stafford Smith, and I've been taught to be very lazy here as they've given me a chair and I can just sit back and slouch. And today we're going to talk about the myth and promise of the UK jury trial. And I want to talk about basically three things. One is, you know, what you all know, David Lamy's proposal to do away with 50% of the jury trials in Britain. The second is my old colleague Rajiv Menon Casey, and there's a Justice Johnson who seems absolutely obsessed in eliminating Bushel's case, which is well discussed. That maybe some of you don't know what that is from 1670 or probably more up to date. Those two are in the media, but the third is really what Donald Rumsfeld would call the unknown unknowns, at least they're unknown, it seems, to the UK, which is the vastly more insidious aspects of what's been done to the British right to a jury trial over many years. And I'd just like to explore a little bit of how that's been done and whether it's a great idea. And obviously, given who I am, I'm going to set this in the context of the US Constitution. So let's start with David Lamy. His proposals are because we've got a backlog of trials, that what we should do is basically abolish a large part of trials, which is truly extraordinary. I mean, one thing you have to always think about is if the government is going to lock you up for a substantial amount of time, or even not, or even just give you a criminal conviction that will be forever on your record and will forever make it impossible for you to do all sorts of things. If the government's going to do that, they really ought to pay for it. And they ought to do it properly. And that's the basic theme of pretty much everything I have to say on this matter. And the idea that we're planning to do away with three with jury trials for prison sentences under three years, which is apparently about 50% of all the jury trials, is extraordinary. A judge would sit on a lot of them and magistrates on a lot more, and we'll discuss in a minute the incredible impact that actually has on certain types of trials. And juries are only retained for serious offenses, whatever that means. You know, I've been trying to help a bunch of people who um who have been protesting about Palestine action. And, you know, these are people, I don't want to characterize them all as septigenarian grannies and grandpas, because that's not true. But there's an awful lot of just people who are out there for a principle, they're not the people that we would normally tar with the word criminal, um, and they're facing time in prison. The ones who are sitting out in tr in Parliament Square are not facing uh, you know, years and years in prison, they're just facing a relatively short amount of time. But it can have an immense uh impact on them. And some of them have now been waiting for their trial for a long, long time, uh, and it just keeps getting put off, whether they want it or not. Um, and I've talked about that on other occasions. And yet the government thinks that the solution to them clogging the system with all sorts of totally pointless trials, while they're not arresting the people in black balatlavas who are genuinely wrecking havoc in Dover and Portsmouth, who apparently are just protesters as opposed to the people in Parliament Square. It's very difficult to fathom what this government thinks it's doing. And one of the principles that we have to look at very carefully every time someone says, well, if we're gonna make the system work, let's just take away the rights of the defendant, is what is the evidence they have for that, both for the fact that it might make things go better and quicker, and for the fact that the system's gonna then work. And when I look at the British legal system, I can think of a lot of things we could do with our trials before I'd cut 50% of them out in terms of juries. And one is that really people in British courts work bankers' hours. When I tried capital cases in Alabama, we would work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. You know, 12 hours is quite a long day when you're doing a death penalty case, but we'd have a very short break for lunch and maybe a couple of other quick coffee breaks, and that was it. And frankly, I think the jurors wanted that. They wanted to get it through and done with. I didn't mind it. I mean, it was pretty hard work, but we'd get it done with quicker too. And it just meant that people had to work a lot harder. And I think we worked way more than twice as hard as the people who are doing British trials. So the first thing I would consider if they want to get rid of the backlog is they maybe make people work a little harder and uh and don't take so much time off. That's not going to be popular with a lot of people, but what I don't think we're seeing is real evidence as to why we need to scrap jury trials. And also I don't think we're seeing what a jury trial really means to what we're talking about. And we'd start with what would happen to David Lamy's proposals in the US. Both in the actual constitution itself and in the Sixth Amendment, which is one of my favorite amendments, obviously, in all criminal prosecutions, the jury shall enjoy the right to a trial by an impartial jury, and it has to be in the place that's been designated. It's normally within a little area that's about no more than 20,000 people. It varies, though, from one place to another. And there was a reason the Americans came up with that, which we'll get into, but there was also a sacrosanct nature to it. It's in the Constitution, so much as people say, oh, you know, our wonderful system in Britain means that we're flexible. No, it's not. It's actually that you lose your rights remarkably quickly when David Lamy does something unwise. And when you go to the US, uh we recently had this case, Ramos versus Louisiana, which I'm very proud of for a number of reasons. One is that one of my wife's clients, who was in prison for something he didn't do, and she finally helped exonerate him, he was an inmate counsel, and he brought Ramos versus Louisiana all the way to the Supreme Court on whether you could have non-unanimous jury verdicts, which Britain's just had willy-nilly for ages. And there were only two states in America that allowed them at the time, and that was Louisiana and Oregon. And Justice Gorsuch, who's one of the people who's normally labeled one of the superconservatives, um, said, you just can't do that. He wrote the opinion and he traced back where this came from, where eliminating the minority from the verdict. So, you know, they would have 10 to 2 verdicts in Louisiana and Britain can have verdicts like that too. And Justice Gorsuch traced to where it was first proposed, which was 1898, uh, which was at a convention in Louisiana where, quote, the avowed purpose was to establish the supremacy of the white race. This was something that the white people considered tragic because the, you know, the Southerners had lost the Civil War and black people couldn't be slaves anymore, and black people were getting votes, although I've got to say there was a strong defense against that for a long time. Uh, and one of the ways that black people were disenfranchised was you were lucky if you were going to get a couple of black jurors out of twelve. And so if you made it a 10-2 verdict, that was the end of their opinion. So even though I do think it's just a scientific fact that uh black people in America have a very different world view and world experience than a lot of white people, they were effectively cut out of the entire system. It was a racist way to eliminate the minority. And one of the things that's very interesting, if you really studied that in Britain, is an awful lot of cases that turn out to be wrongful convictions in Britain were non-unanimous verdicts. Again, another of my wife's cases, Andy Malkinson, many of you will remember that. It was a total scandal. That poor man lived in our house for a year when finally got him out, uh, and he couldn't get a house then because he was on the sex offender list, even though he's patently innocent. His was a non-unanimous verdict, and the minority jurors were overridden by the majority who were just wrong. Uh, and this is very worrying. And that's one facet of the jury. But there's another that in a way is even more important, and this is where we get to Bushel's case. There's a thing about jurors which is um philosophical, which is are they there just to do what the government thinks they should do? Or are they there as a protection against the government? Not just a protection against the government nabbing the wrong person and prosecuting someone who's innocent of the crime, but a protection uh against the government doing something that's just fundamentally unjust. Uh and the case, the Bushels case, arose out of the prosecution of William Penn. The reason there's a picture of Pennsylvania up there is actually William Penn later went to America and Pennsylvania took its name from him. And him and William Meade were these evil Quaker dissenters. Um, and the British law at the time said it was a criminal offense if anyone but the Church of England had a preaching session to more than five people. And William Penn and William Meade were talking to a whole bunch of people that wanted to hear what they had to say. And this was obviously a patently um bad law. And the question was whether the jury would acquit these guys. Now, back then it was very much the view of the judiciary that the jury was meant to do what they were told. And if A plus B meant that C, the guy was guilty of what the government had laid down as a law, then they had to find that. Indeed, there was a time they would be put in the jury room without bread and water and held there until they came back with the correct verdict. And if they came back with the wrong verdict, they would themselves, the jurors, be prosecuted for perjury. Uh, something quite similar was happening for the two Williams. And um the jurors went out once, they debated, they came back, and they found clearly these guys had been preaching, but they found that it wasn't an illegal preaching. And so the judge was pretty pissed off at this and said, you know, you this this is just wrong. And he sent them back and sort of threatened them and told them that they had to do what they'd found. If they'd found those that thing that they were preaching and they weren't Church of England preachers, then these guys were guilty. As the jury was going out, William Penn supposedly shouted, You're Englishmen, mind your privilege and give away not away your right. And Edward Bushel, who was the chair the foreperson of the jury, said, Nor shall we ever do. And indeed, they were sent out for a whole lot more time. They came back with another verdict saying that um that it was uh uh an illegitimate under the law, but it wasn't illegal, and the judge got annoyed again. And this time he locked them up until they did the right thing, according to him, and they refused to. Um and he held them in contempt and he told them that if they uh if they for what they did, they were to go to jail themselves, um, and they'd stay there until they paid a fine. And apparently most of them paid the fine, but a couple of them didn't, Edward Bushel being one of them. And there was a habeas corpus act uh case brought on his behalf, and the courts finally ordered his release. Now it wasn't easy, it wasn't just, yeah, all right, Mr. Bushel's perfectly within his rights. He originally lost, but eventually the Chief Justice ruled in his favor rather unwillingly and said that jurors can never be told what to do, and you can never look behind a verdict of acquittal. If the jurors acquit you, you're acquitted, and there's no appeal from that. And indeed, as you go into the uh rural courts of justice, it's ironic that where you're going as a juror, there's this plaque to um William Penn and William Meade on your left as you go in there, and anyone who walks through is gonna see that, and it uh it uh solemnizes and celebrates the fact that those jurors did justice rather than simply convict. So one might think, oh, this is firmly established in law. Well, it isn't, and this is the next facet of the process that's being attacked. And here it's not so much that they haven't studied it, it's just they haven't thought about, or they haven't at least agreed with what Bushel's case says, what the philosophy is, what a juror is really there to do. Is a juror, and I'd be curious what your thoughts are, but is a juror there just to do what the government says they should do and find the facts, and if the facts say X, send the person down, or is the juror genuinely there as a protection against government overreaching? I think looking back on persecuting the Quakers, we'd kind of all agree, oh, well, obviously that was a stupid law and good for the jurors for what they did. It's hard to say that the same principle shouldn't apply in the Palestine Action cases. And in the case of the Filton Six, those are rather bedraggled looking people there, they had broken into Elbit systems and their whole beef, and it seems not to be disputed that Elbert was making weapons that they were giving to Israel, and Israel was using it, using those weapons to kill a lot of people in Gaza. And so these six people broke into Elbit and they smashed up a bunch of equipment. Now, one of them went too far. There was one of the security guards who was tasering one of the Filton six, and one of these guys here hit that person with a sledgehammer. And look, we got laws, right? And what he did was uh an assault on the battery and you know, grievous bodily harm, probably. So you got laws to prosecute them. Whether you need laws about Palestine action being terrorists, as opposed to sometimes getting a bit carried away and doing something that's just a common or garden criminal act, is is a different matter. And to begin with, um it was Rajiv was representing him. Now, this chap, Justice Andrew Johnson, he never did criminal law, he was just in the city uh doing corporate stuff, and he that's really where he was meant to be sitting, but somehow he ends up on uh on this criminal case. And he seems, from what I've been reading, to really got the bit between his teeth that jurors are there just to follow the law. And there's this notion that it does tend to permeate British legal philosophy, that um there's an objective justice, and really the whole point of jury trials is to just follow that objective justice. I fundamentally disagree with that. I've spent a lot of my life representing people who I think are being mistreated horribly, as in Guantanamo, I'm going the day after tomorrow to um Baghdad to try to help 6,000 people who are in what we call Guantanamo on the Euphrates, where the US has taken them all and put them in Camp Cropper in Iraq, even though they were in Syria. And you know hundreds of them are going to be innocent, but that's never stood between governments and their desire to do horrible things to people. You know, one of the ones I hope to see is Jack Letts, and I know people have very strong views about Jack Letts, and some people like to throw around jihadi Jack. Well, I've met Jack. I met him in Syria when I went there to see him. And Jack is no terrorist, and he was arrested by ISIS three times because he disagreed with him. So I think people have a right fundamentally to have a trial about whether they should just be held without any allegations, whether they could be held in Iraq where they may never have been, and so forth. But um of the 6,000, the Iraqi system so far has found not guilty nine people, and the others are supposedly are guilty. Uh, we will see. Um, but to me that's anathema to the whole system, and they they aren't obviously getting jury trials in Iraq. Now, Justice Andrew Johnson was asked by the jurors whether they could find someone not guilty because they felt because those perpetrators felt morally compelled to act. As in, you know, the Filton Six felt morally compelled that to stop uh genocide in Gaza, they needed to stop sending weapons to them. And so Justice Johnson, and I use the word justice pretty liberally there, I think, um said, no, that's not a defense. Despite this, um, Rajiv referenced Bushel's case in his closing statement, and none of them were convicted, not even the guy with the sledgehammer, the jurors reached the conclusion that whatever they were doing, there were a bunch of them were acquitted, and the others the jurors couldn't make up their mind. Now, the moment that trial was over, Justice Johnson issued a 15-page contempt citation against Rajib for mentioning Bushel's case and for relying on it before the jurors, who had walked presumably past the very sign that um that had been stuck up there in the Royal Courts of Justice. Um and so Rajiv was facing prison and disbarment and all sorts of things. Now, the the higher court threw that out because Justice Johnson hadn't done it properly, but then they came back and did it again. Um, and that's still pending for Rajiv. Um and the jurors were, no, not the jurors, the the Filton Six were retried, and four of them were convicted and faced long sentences in prison. Justice Johnson remained on that trial. Uh, he has aggravated it as a terrorism offense. And that's pretty shocking. And I think that's a really big threat to our jury system, and it's not just me that thinks that. I'm going to read to you a quote from a Ukraine newspaper that was commenting on this case. And it goes like this: the strength of a legal system is measured not by how comfortably it handles popular litigants, but by how confidently it protects the rights of those whose causes provoke hostility. The freedom of advocates to defend such clients without fear of personal prosecution is not an indulgence. It's one of the principal guarantees that courts remain places where justice is determined by law rather than by power. Well, I think justice is determined by a bit more even than law, unless law includes Bushel's case. I have always represented people whose causes provoke hostility. And I've been put on trial for contempt in various forms five times, and sometimes just for asserting the rights of some chap who's facing the death penalty. Now, fortunately, I've not been convicted in any of those cases, but I can tell you from personal experience, it's very important to have a jury or a decision maker who has the right to do justice and not just convict me when the prosecution says they should. Now, there's a different twist to this too. And here I'm just going to tell you a quick story. Uh, and I'm going to use a very rude word, and I'm going to ask you what it means. There's this woman, one of my students at Bristol Law School, went in at my um encouragement, he went to magistrates' court uh uh just to watch a case. And the th the issue was this jurors have the Bushels right to do justice, but magistrates actually don't. Um, and the question was would he go there and talk to a bunch of magistrates and see if they just had to do what they were told? Um And the case he came across just purely by chance was this woman who was already in prison during several months in prison and she was being prosecuted because when the police had come to her to arrest her, she had called them um or one of them bent cunt. Now, excuse me for my language, but I'm just curious as to what you think that means. It's not the second word that matters, it's the first word, bent. And I want you to think what the word bent meant. Now what the person on troll, the woman on troll, I won't say her name, um, she basically agreed with a 1656 translation of Thomas Hobbes, uh which would have pleased the people in Bushel's case, no doubt, uh, that bent means bent, as in twisted or corrupt, perhaps in a pejorative sense. But of course, some people think it means gay. And one of the cops turned out to be gay, and he didn't take it as gay to begin with, but then someone said that must be what she meant. She insisted she didn't mean that, and she had no idea the guy was gay. Um, but she was prosecuted. The magistrates found that she'd done it, notwithstanding her insistence, that's not what she meant, and they sentenced her to a bunch more time in prison for that. There was concurrence, so it was totally pointless. They'd just spent all day in court with three magistrates, all white, the the defendant, the defendant's lawyer, the prosecutor, a bunch of security people, the two police who had to come in and testify. All of them wasted their entire day so they could convict this woman of that. And the head magistrate, white male, about 60, um, concluded at the end after she'd left the courtroom, well, that was a waste of time, wasn't it? Well, it was a waste of time. It was a total waste of time. And the government needs to be told not to do that stuff, because otherwise we're going to waste a lot more time and they're going to tell us that they have to cut back the right to trials. Again, what do we see in the US? Right now, and this is a fairly recent case, uh, US versus Thomas, but there's lots more of them. The courts have long recognized several features of our jury trial system, act to protect the jury's power to acquit, regardless of the evidence, when the prosecution's case meets the jury, meets with the jury's moral disapproval. That's the issue. If the jury, the whole point of a jury is to have the common sense views of local people, and if they they disagree with it as a matter of their own morality, they're not going to send you to prison. That's the whole point. Uh, and that was the point of Bushel's case, and that's the very part of it that right now the judiciary are trying to do away with in Britain. And I want you to be aware of that, and I want you to recognise your duty to do something about it. There are, though, we're now on the third part, which I think are vastly more dangerous aspects, even than that. And they're more dangerous because no one sees what's happening. The people in Britain are, and I've said this many, many times, and I don't mean to offend people, but I think British people are so complacent about the way that their legal system operates and the way it's going. Another case my wife did was of the Freshwater Five, these five fishermen who were meant to have taken their fishing boat out into the middle of the channel in a rough seas, and some big ship supposedly threw 52 million pounds worth of cocaine off the back, and supposedly they picked it up, uh, and it was later found bobbing around in Freshwater Bay off the Isle of Wight. I I was there when poor Emily did so much work on it, and I can tell you, I think the legal term for that case is total bullshit. And those guys between them got over a hundred years in prison, and they haven't won their case because the Criminal Cases Review Commission and the Court of Appeal are frankly just wrong in the way they approach this. But the thing that got me to begin with was why were they being tried in South London when the offence happened in the Isle of White? If it had been the Isle of White, everyone would have known about what the channel's like. They'd know that you don't throw $52 million off the back of a boat in a storm in the channel and expect a fishing boat to pick it up. They would have known that all of this was nonsense and they would have had probably deep suspicion of what were then the SOCA police officers, the serious organized crimes agency police officers, who I think frankly just lied in the trial, but it's not up to me to say. But I think those jurors in Dale of White would have felt that way. And they also would have known a bit about Jamie and the other people on his boat, uh, and they would have known who he was and that he wasn't some drug dealer, um, or he was unlikely to be. The question is, why how could the British government, with all its power, haul those people up to South London right next door to the Soker headquarters? And an issue came up in the trial about whether the police were messing with the jury, and that was the the courts ruled against um the defendants on that, but it looked pretty suspicious to me. But why was it there in the first place? Because in the US, um the Article III, the Constitution itself says that the jury has to be picked in the state where the crime shall have been committed. You know, the Sixth Amendment says the district previously ascertained by law. When you look at each state, it's almost invariably just the county where the crime took place. And they're not as big as our counties. Um, the county in in Louisiana, for example, has an average of about 30 or 40,000 people in it, so it's pretty small. And these are places where you genuinely have a local sense. Now, that's the constitutional right there. Um, we don't have that in this country, and you wonder what is the decision, who makes the decision, and how do people challenge it when the freshwater five are dragged to London? And the fact is they just don't get to do it, and the government gets to do what it wants. But it gets worse, and these are just cases I've been involved in, and I won't name names again, but there's a case um in you know up in Birmingham where it's a pretty hot case is about whether this guy was really supporting um Hamas. And I'm pretty clear he wasn't, and actually the first jury refused to convict him, even though zero out of twelve of the jurors were Muslim. Now, if you look at Birmingham, the census shows that about 30% of people in Birmingham are Muslim, and it's slightly more complicated than that. But the probability of picking an a non-Muslim jury 100% is about is under 2%, anyhow. Um, and how do you get that? That stuff doesn't just happen by chance, or it happens very, very rarely by chance, and it's happened in every single case I've witnessed so far, so I'm beginning to think these things are not by chance. Now in America, it could never happen. And the reason it couldn't happen is we'd do a jury challenge. And I've tried to get people in this country to do a jury challenge, where if the probability of seeing a particular array is under 5%, then that's a prima facie case of racial or gender or whatever discrimination. And then the burden shifts to the government to explain it. Now maybe they can explain it, but they've got to explain it, and very rarely do they explain it because it's normally because someone's rigging the system in some way. And they may not be doing that sitting back saying, you know, I hate Muslims. They may be doing it because they think, oh, it's inappropriate in a case where this is obviously about very much Palestine issue, that uh Muslims should sit on it, surely they'll be bass. No, you can't say that, that's just not right. Um, you know, you can't say that the black people are going to be bass in favor of a black defendant and so forth. So you need to have a challenge to the array. Now, the next case I was involved in was a chap who was being tried in Bournemouth, and I come into the courtroom and I was helping him on it, and uh, it was just really interesting. I mean, just everything I saw just horrified me. But the jurors really horrified me. There were 12 jurors on the case, 11 were over the age of 45, and actually five were over the age of 60. Um, and you know, you just can't have that. And at the same time, they were all white. And with race, the 16% of Bournemouth is BAME. So the probability of that is less than 10% of having no BAME people on the jury. But the age one is actually worse. Um, the the probability of those that breakdown of age is is about 3.5%. But if you put them both together, and this is only quasi-legitimate statistically, but put them both together, the probability is less than half of 1%. It just didn't happen by chance. Something's going on there. And I talked to the barrister on the case, who was pretty young and really honestly hadn't done much. She hadn't even been to the so-called crime scene. She'd barely met the defendant, and um I'd been to the crime scene because it was someone I knew, and I'd worked out what had really happened. And it was clearly that the police were the ones who assaulted him rather than him assaulting the police, as the jury did ultimately find. So it worked out well in the end, but it was no thanks to the system. Um, and it's just shocking because if you had that in America, the first thing you would do is you would be challenging it. And you'd be challenging the people who showed up and the people who were picked on the jury, as we do in every case in America. Now, there are other ways to look at this, and one of the things about the British system is as we change what we do in Britain and we change the law and we think we can do away with all sorts of different rights, we've done away with peremptory challenges, we'll talk about that in a minute. We've done away with most challenges for cause because you can't figure out who's biased. They do that because they say, oh, you know, you randomly pick 12 people and you're gonna get 12 unbiased people. And they just say that. Now, part of your problem is that you'll never know if what they're saying's true, because what they do is they do everything to cover up what the truth actually is. And they do that because they really believe the system shouldn't be challenged, because they believe, and this is honest. I'm not saying they're just honest in any way. They really do believe that it's important for the British people to have faith in the system. Indeed, there was a famous judge in the case, going back to the Guildford 4 and the Birmingham bombers, who said it would be better that we executed an innocent person or two than that the people of Britain should lose faith in their justice system. That's madness. That's total madness. Um, and one of the problems with Britain is it's very hard to prove it. And I was wondering, you know, let's let's figure out whether this is true, that if you just take the first 12 people, you're likely to get a um uh a jury that's fair. And where it matters most is in cases that are contentious. You know, the cases where it's just a common or garden thing, yeah, there are going to be people who are biased. There always are, because you know, maybe it's a bike theft and your bike was stolen last week or whatever. So there's still a need to know who is who on a jury. But when you're dealing with something like throwing the Colston statue in the harbor or Palestine action, um it's really, really unlikely that just taking the first 12 people is gonna get 12 people who are totally unbiased. And remember, in Bushel's case, the jury is there to make sure that the jurors do justice rather than merely convict. So I had my students do a pub crawl in Bristol. It was quite fun. I'm not sure it was sanctioned by the university, but uh the whole bunch of us. I went round with one student, then the others went round in pairs, and we visited 64 pubs. We talked to 272, just random people we met in the pubs, and then we just did this because it was a nice, easy way. I'm not saying it's 100% valid of all the people in Bristol, but it's a pretty good survey of the sort of people who might end up on uh a jury. And of the 272 people we talked to, where we asked them, would you always convict someone who's charged with um being part of Palestine Action? Would you never convict someone who's part of Palestine Action, or would you just keep an open mind? Only 28% of them said they'd keep an open mind. 52%, which should worry the government, said they'd never convict them if they're given the chance. And Bristol's quite a liberal city. But the idea that these people were all unbiased is just silly. 72% were not unbiased, they were biased one way or the other. Um that's why you shouldn't be an ostrich and stick your head in the sand. What you've got to do is be sensible about it. And what does the US system say about it? US system says we've got to have jury selection. And you have a jury selection process where you get to ask questions of jurors. I love it, I love it. I've done it many, many times. It's my favorite part of a trial. Because you get to talk to all these people in front of you, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups, and you get to ask them what's important to them and ask them their opinions. And actually, people are really cool about it. It's a bit intimidating unless you set them at ease. But once you get people calmed down and relaxed a bit, they they just tell you everything. And you don't say, Are you racist? You ask them questions about O.J. Simpson or about whatever. And that brings out the biases that people have. Very rarely. There was only one case I remember ever having a prosecutor ask a juror if the juror was biased. And the juror said, Yeah, I'm biased. I'm biased about pretty much everything. And, you know, that was sort of interesting and probably incredibly honest. But that's the only time out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of jurors that's ever happened. So it's very unlikely that when those people in their wigs in Britain turn to jurors and say, anyone here biased? Well, you know, it's very unlikely they're going to say it. Some people do, but not many. The whole point of jury selection is really to uncover unconscious bias, bias that people have that they don't even recognize themselves. I mean, we all know that people are sexist. And, you know, you can bring out gender bias quite easily in jury selection and race bias, too. Um, you they're gonna have other things, some of which favor the prosecution, some of which favor the defense, you know. Obviously, I like jurors who don't like authority very much. Uh, there are gonna be people who are quite ageists, and it goes every way. Sometimes people are really scared of young people. Uh, there are gonna be people who have all sorts of prejudices, uh, and that's what you get out of asking jurors questions. Now, the reason that the British got rid of all of this jury selection thing is twofold, I think. One is they say, oh, you know, the lawyers are just trying to pick a jury that's passed in their favor. No, actually not. We're trying to do two things. We're trying to identify the biases in the juries, and then we're also trying to identify the language they speak, because so many, uh, you'll forgive me for saying um public school educated as I was, uh, lawyers in Britain talk somewhat down to jurors and certainly over their heads in the sense they use words that no one would understand and they talk about things that no one understands. The great thing about jury selection is you get to know what a juror really cares about and what a juror really thinks. I will never forget this case I had just north of the lake in Louisiana, um, where I talked to my client, and this is a great example of my own pomposity, right? I asked Charlie, I said, Charlie, what's your dream in life? I was trying to figure out who Charlie was so I could present him. And remember, you know, we have average of, you know, long time, months and months to get ready for trial, and we know the clients really well, which you need to if you're presenting them. And I said, Charlie, what's your dream? And Charlie said, Oh, my dream is to be married, have a family, have a job with health insurance, and have a house with a mortgage. And that was it. I said, No, no, no, no, Charlie, I'm not talking about your basic standard of living. What's your dream dream? And he just kept repeating the same thing. And I realized that actually I was the incredibly weird and privileged one, and that that's a lot of people's dream. And I picked 12 jurors who um said the same thing, who said their passion and their dream was to have a family, to have a house with a mortgage, and to have a job with health insurance. Because what happened to Charlie is Charlie was married and he had his kids and he had his job with health insurance and he had his house with a mortgage. His wife left him, took the kids, ran off with the congressman's nephew, which is why this case they were really hot to get the death penalty. Um, and then Charlie got terribly depressed. He basically lost his mind. He lost his job after he was out of his job for a while, he lost his uh his mortgage and he lost his health insurance, and he was left with absolutely nothing. And then the straw that broke the camel's back, and I had got a little camel made out of straw that one of my students had done, and the straw that broke that camel's back was when he saw his wife with her boyfriend outside what had been his house, and he just lost it, and he shot them both. Now, I'm not excusing what he did, of course, but it was it was humanly understandable and way more understandable to those twelve jurors than to some posh person who wouldn't have all those dreams. Um, and so I was doing the closing argument and I broke the camel's back, and some of the jurors were looking at me like they were gonna kill me. Um, and they came back in our favor, quickest verdict I've ever had in five minutes. And they said they didn't want to talk to the prosecutor, they just wanted to talk to me. And I went in there to talk to them, which we're allowed to do. Uh, and I said to one juror, I thought you were gonna execute me too. And he said, Man, I was just trying not to cry because you were talking about my life. And I couldn't have done that if I didn't know who those jurors were. And those jurors really did justice for Charlie. One of the prosecutors resigned in the middle of the penalty phase because he'd decided what they were doing was just unfair. And I have immense respect for that guy. I went out for a drink with him that night and I admired what he did. But that's what representing people is about. It's not about just parroting some nonsense that leads to the conviction and lengthy sentence of someone. Now, in England, of course, the jurors couldn't have talked to me because this is what the gov.uk contempt of court thing says. After the trial, you must not talk about what happened in the deliberation room, even with family members. You know, those of you who'd like to talk about your jury service, you're about to commit a criminal offense. Uh, in America, of course, they can do that. And why not? I think, in my experience, being on a jury is generally one of the most interesting things that happen in many people's lives. I wish I could be on the jury. I'd love to. Uh, and I've talked to the jurors in every case, and it's so fascinating. In America, you can always do it. There are one or two places where the jurors have to come forward to you, only two that I know of. But the overwhelming majority, you can just go talk to anyone. They don't have to talk to you, but if they want to, they do. And I have to say, I'm not sure I've ever had someone refuse me, you know, when I've talked to them. And you learn so many things. I mean, you learn weird things. Like one capital trial I was doing, the jurors finally acquitted the guy that they were out for hours, and we had destroyed the government's case. I couldn't think what they were talking about. Um, one of the jurors told me afterwards that the only holdout juror had watched me all trial and noticed apparently that I stood on the side of my shoes, and he had decided that every time I stand on the side of my shoes, I'm lying. And then, watching my closing argument, he said that every time I said my client was innocent, I was standing on the side of my shoes. Ergo, my client was guilty, and that's why the guy wanted to find him guilty of capital murder and madness. I've never stood on the side of my shoes since then. But why shouldn't the jurors tell me that? At the same time, there are much more profound things that you learn from jurors, including one set of jurors who said that they didn't understand the word mitigation, which was what they were meant to be deciding. Um, none of them. And then one of them said, Well, you know, even though we'd now shown that the two pieces of evidence the government had, which was old-time serology evidence, had been disproven by DNA, and the snitch, who had said the client confessed to it, had recanted and said he lied. She said, No, no, no. I know he's guilty of this one and three other murders. And she had a PhD in English, but she also said she had ESP, extrasensory perception, and she had decided the guy was guilty because she'd looked in her crystal ball. I mean, that's crazy, crazy. And I can't tell you how many times something like that comes up. And the reason I'm pretty confident that the the British authorities don't want you talking to jurors, is that you're going to find out this madness. Uh, and I think when you look at the British jury trial, it's in deep trouble. We've lost so many of the rights we have in America. You don't have jury selection, you don't have peremptory challenges in the same way that we do. And it's all to do with more efficiently getting people to a final verdict. That's not what a jury trial is about. And indeed, when I'm representing someone for his life or freedom or her life or freedom, I want the government to do its job right. Thank you.