Issue 141  9th May 2020

The Bar Council, the representative body for all barristers in England and Wales, will help self-employed barristers showing Covid-19 symptoms to get tested under the Department of Health & Social Care employer referral testing scheme.

With most barristers being self-employed, the burden of arranging testing and the associated administration would fall on each individual barrister. The Bar Council will instead act as a ‘quasi-employer’ for the profession and facilitate the tests for barristers who have been identified as essential workers because of their critical role in the justice system.

The Government’s employer referral portal allows employers to refer for testing any essential workers and those whose work cannot be done from home and who are self-isolating with coronavirus symptoms. Those who are living with an essential or other such worker, and who themselves have symptoms, can also get an appointment for testing through this scheme, whether or not the worker has symptoms.

Caroline Goodwin QC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said: “Any change from the norm even those contemplated by any extra emergency powers needs careful consideration. This is not the time for knee-jerk reaction. We note that justice minister Chris Philp made mention before Parliament this week of reducing the minimum number of jurors needed – from nine to seven – but states that this a distant consideration requiring changes to primary legislation...

Turning to the importance of juries – they are an integral part of our justice system. They bring a collective wisdom and objectivity to cases, being socially responsible, not just in the more routine cases but in the most factually and legally complicated. The criminal justice system remains the preserve of our collective responsibility, and not the domain of any elite minority. The right to trial by jury remains, as Lord Devlin remarked “the lamp that shows that freedom lives.” Maintaining general public participation in juries, without delineation for crime categories, ensures that the embers will continue to burn that fire the lamp of freedom.”

Magistrates Association: Our National Chair John Bache has an article in @thetimes today calling for the sentencing powers of magistrates to be extended to ease the court backlog and pressure on crown courts.

The two leading prison reform groups in the country have today (Wednesday 6 May) published more than a dozen key documents that shed further light on the government’s response to coronavirus in prisons in England and Wales...

The documents reveal that the government was warned in late March that as many as 3,500 people in prison could die during the pandemic. This is in stark contrast to updated advice published by the Ministry of Justice a month later, which estimated that 100 people would die. In their reply to the charities, the government’s lawyers confirmed that the programme of releases had not been abandoned. They stated that, as of 28 April, 200 people in prison had been approved for temporary release and a further 300 were being considered with further information awaited. However, the programme of temporary releases remains very limited.

People suspected of crimes including murder and rape are increasingly being charged by post, figures suggest. Last year Britain’s biggest police force sent 12 suspects letters telling them they would be tried for murder, an increase of seven compared with the previous year. In 2017 two were sent. The Metropolitan Police also issued postal charges to 91 people suspected of rape in 2019 — more than double the previous year’s figure of 43. Letters were also sent to 414 people charging them with sex offences.