You have a day off, you lucky people

I'm appearing in court tomorrow. No, it's not the libel courts, nor have I been arraigned on some horrendous crime (stealing books, stalking people with hairstyles). I'm giving evidence - hopefully. This trial's been cancelled before, and it's dragged on for over a year now… getting more like Jarndyce v Jarndyce by the week.

I'll tell you all about it on my release. Return! I meant return!

Try to survive without me, and without speculating on what I've been up to.

Court Short

What an appalling waste of a day. Rather than swimming, writing and blogging, I dragged myself out by 8 a.m. to get to Brierley Hill, where Dudley County Court is based. It's a converted office block in the midst of a depressing business estate (mostly To Let) - but at least the legal toffs have to travel through the concrete jungle to get there.

Once inside, the victim, her mother, their (Lithuanian) translator and I were left in an airless, featureless room for 6 hours. We got over the language barrier and chatted a bit: our first meeting was rather fraught and social niceties weren't observed. I've been to Lithuania so we talked about Vilnius, and the translator studied in the Philology department at Vilnius University, where I gave a paper, so we discovered mutual acquaintances, but after a while, boredom, the upcoming confrontation, and the artificiality of the situation intruded on our sunny dispositions.

Turns our there was nothing to anticipate. First the defendant's lawyer and his interpreter (don't know which language) went to the cells to point out that he was guilty as sin and should give up now in exchange for a lighter sentence. Then there were apparently several hours of legal argument. Then we were informed that the defendant had sacked his lawyer and the new one would need a few months to acquaint himself with the case.

So my day was wasted, the victim was left without resolution and still clearly terrified of this bloke, a professional translator had been hired for the day, plus a night in a hotel, plus the very expensive legal teams (all paid for by the state) - what a farce. And it's all going to happen again at some point in the future. At least I got to read the paper in peace, get a long way through Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and avoid a deathly staff discussion day, though the architecture and decor were virtually indistinguishable from the university. There's a joke about incarceration and Kafka in there somewhere, but I'll leave it to you.

Still, I saw a little bit more of the West Midlands and can tick it off the list of places to visit. Dudley was closed and Brierley Hill had clearly recently been used for a post-apocalypse film (although Survivors made the postwar city look livelier and cleaner). There's something rather sweet about listening to Bach's Cello Suites while gazing out on post-industrial decay, the grey relieved only by the occasional splash of vomit on the pavement.

How's your day been?

The wheels on the bus…

It's turned out to be an annoyingly tedious day - my workload allocation is becoming nightmarishly complicated and changes by the hour. And now I find that the court appearance I have tomorrow has been changed from Wolverhampton (walking distance from home) to Brierley Hill - over an hour by two buses. What joy. So you won't be hearing from me tomorrow. Unless it's in the newspapers.

Twelve men good and true

What a public-spirited citizen - and he got away with it! Not that I'd want him on my jury.

I did jury service a few years ago. It felt like being inducted into to a lynch-mob. They all read the Daily Mail and kept saying things like 'he must have done it - he's in court' and 'he must be guilty because he doesn't look sorry' (the chap was pleading innocent and we'd seen him for all of five minutes before being sent out for legal argument. I didn't endear myself to my fellow jurors by affirming rather than swearing on a holy book, by reading the Guardian, and for pointing out that voting guilty on particular charges because he'd obviously done something wasn't really the point. I felt sorry for one guy though - he shared the bus ride home with the defendants every evening, which seemed a bit odd.

The trouble is, we worked hard as a jury, and the court officials, lawyers and police appeared not to have done so. Important questions weren't asked, important problems weren't raised, and the judge seemed to live in a different world - which is a problem. I don't mind a judge not knowing that Stella is known as 'wifebeater' or (in one defendant's words) 'loopy-juice', but you have to question the worldliness of a man who asks the defence 'What is this Stella?' ('a lager, m'lud') and follows it with 'and in what quantities does one consume this beverage?' (in pint glasses, m'lud).

Was justice done in the cases I sat on? Case one came to an 11-1 verdict of guilty. Guess who voted not guilty? I thought he had committed criminal acts, but that no evidence had been presented. We voted not guilty on the second case because we thought that he probably was guilty but that the prosecution and coppers could have done some fairly easy work to nail him, but didn't.

Anyone else been on (or in front of) a jury?