S4M-04234 Reforming Scots Criminal Law and Practice (Public Consultation)

The Presiding Officer (Tricia Marwick): The next item of business is a debate on motion S4M-04234, in the name of Kenny MacAskill, on the public consultation on the Carloway report, “Reforming Scots Criminal Law and Practice”. We can be generous if members take interventions.

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Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):
In the debate in December, the cabinet secretary said:

“The status quo is not tenable. We have to make changes and it is therefore important that we set the tone by showing, as we have done today, that this is about having a discussion and debate with the legal profession and with the general public.”—[Official Report, 1 December 2011; c 4249.]

Today’s wide-ranging debate has maintained the proper tone to help us all to be better informed as we move to further discussions on the subject.

I very much welcome the opportunity to return to justice debates. In session 1 I served on the Justice 2 Committee, and in session 2 I served on the Justice 1 Committee. Having a major prison in my constituency, I have taken a close interest in the penal system and have visited Peterhead, Porterfield and Saughton prisons. I have also visited Polmont young offenders institution, la Bapaume, near Paris, and Parc prison in Wales. I have visited sheriff courts in Dornoch and Glasgow, and I served on a jury 30 years ago at Linlithgow sheriff court. On one occasion, I visited the hospital for the criminally insane at Carstairs. However, none of that makes me an expert. I am surrounded by a lawyer, a policeman, a Queen’s counsel and another lawyer, all of whom have spoken in the debate and have expertise to which I am not going to try to aspire. Just as Rumpole of the Bailey might have been an Old Bailey hack, I am an old Parliament hack, in such matters.

We know that justice operates very differently in other countries. In 2006, I was in Georgia, in the Caucasus, on two occasions under the sponsorship of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, running courses for local political parties on how democracy works. I had the opportunity to meet the Georgian justice minister, whose great claim to fame was that he had put 3,000 more people in prison and had reduced the time that people had to queue to visit their relatives in prison from a week to three days. That was a very different environment from the one that we face today.

It is obvious that not every customer of the system is entirely satisfied. I say that from the point of view of both the victims and those who are being prosecuted. When I was coming down to Parliament on the train yesterday, I heard an animated conversation in the seat behind me. One person was clearly a criminal; he had just broken the terms of his parole and thought that he was going down for four years. However, his chum trumped him, as he was up on an attempted murder charge and out on bail. I did not attempt to engage them to get more details; I thought that that might not be the thing to do.

On another occasion, I was in a cell in Saughton with six murderers—as a day visitor—and I was hearing their stories. One of them complained to me that, although he had served his life sentence and been released, he had been recalled simply because he had been present at another murder. He had not committed it—he had only been present, so he thought that it should not have counted.

Those stories show that we can probably discount significantly some of the things we hear about the criminal justice system and its operation. However, we should not imagine that we have a perfect system, and it is necessary that we examine the system and seek ways of improving it.

Several members have mentioned ways—such as television—of allowing people to appear in court before a sheriff without necessarily being physically present. That is important, as many of the current processes are done very much by rote and do not obviously contribute to justice.

I once visited Glasgow sheriff court with the Justice 1 Committee on a Monday morning. We were in the court for an hour sitting in the jury box, which was not being used. We saw 59 appearances being dealt with in a single hour, and we were left pretty baffled as to how any of that process contributed to justice. We should certainly consider any ways in which we can avoid, by using modern technology, having to aggregate a lot of people in one location.

Thinking back to my appearance as a juror at Linlithgow sheriff court some 30 years ago, and listening to our discussion today of the issues around corroboration and evidence, it strikes me that evidence is now a much more complex and diverse matter than it was 100 or 150 years ago. In the two-day trial on which I was a juror, I found that the sheriff was first class in summing up, explaining what was expected of the jury and outlining the tests that we might apply to the evidence in considering the guilt or innocence of the two accused in front of us, and which verdicts we should come to.

However, I cannot help but imagine that, given the increased complexity of evidence, the sheriff might usefully have told us about the sort of tests that we might want to think about as we heard the evidence and before we considered it.

In a two-day trial, one can think back to the start, but I had a professional colleague who was once on a trial that lasted for four months. I cannot even remember what happened last week most of the time, let alone what happened three months ago; I know that I am not alone among those of us who are of a certain age.

I will bring my remarks a conclusion as soon as the Presiding Officer nods more vigorously.

The Deputy Presiding Officer: You have one minute.

Stewart Stevenson: Thank you. That is helpful.

About 150 years ago, we were looking very much at remembered evidence, and the evidence of what people saw was reported in court. Now, we are often looking at evidence that is recorded. Technology has provided the evidence, so the character of it and, therefore, how we should judge it, are quite different.

It is 110 years since the first person was a victim in the criminal justice system of the benefits of dactyloscopy, which is the science of fingerprint recognition. From that point onwards, science became part of the evidence base, and we may not have fully caught up with everything that has come along since.

I am interested in Michael McMahon’s efforts on the three verdicts, but we should abolish the not guilty verdict and keep the not proven verdict, because that is the older of the two. Incidentally, in my experience in the sheriff court, there were, out of the 14 charges, seven not proven verdicts, five not guilty verdicts and two guilty verdicts. Juries are quite capable of dealing with such matters when they have the evidence.

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