Why Channel 4's The Jury: Murder Trial is both timely and important television

Our justice system is at breaking point. It doesn’t matter that the real reason is chronic underfunding. Juries are easier to blame and paint as old and inefficient. Juries, with their roots in the Dark Ages, have been deliberating on serious criminal cases for more than 800 years. Leveson’s proposal to reassign more criminal offences as triable by judge and magistrates in England and Wales might sound sensible, but I believe it’s the thin edge of the wedge – and we’ll be the poorer for it.

No system is perfect, but the jury trial – 12 men and women, picked at random, and charged with the task of deciding the guilt or innocence of their fellow citizens – is not only fit for purpose but remains the fairest in the world.

Jurors bring their life experience with them and use those experiences when they scrutinise the evidence to understand the story behind the case. Because there are 12 of them, you get people from all backgrounds, who will more likely reflect the defendant’s own, better than a middle-class judge or magistrate. Juries will know what it’s like to be poor or young or non-white. For a jury, every case is fresh, not something that they’ve heard hundreds of times before. I’m always struck by the attention juries give a case, something both victims and defendants deserve.

Channel 4’s The Jury: Murder Trial, on which I advised, is therefore both timely and important. They take a real trial and re-enact it with actors in front of 12 jurors selected at random, very much like the real thing. The question in the new series is: did Sophie Fairlow murder her boyfriend Ryan Hargrove [not their real names]? As a criminal barrister and author (my memoir, Defending the Guilty, was made into a TV drama in 2018 starring Will Sharpe and Katherine Parkinson), it’s fascinating to be able to watch a jury behind closed doors.

That’s because real-life jury deliberations are secret and Channel 4’s Jury experiment sheds light on a hidden, unexplored world. We see not only how jurors handle the case facts and the law, but also the emotional toll that deciding guilt and innocence takes upon them.

The question I asked myself while watching the series was whether it had shaken my faith in the jury system. I have to admit that I was shocked at times at how imprecise the deliberations could be – despite the attention the jury gives to the case – and how hard the jurors found it to apply the law. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been: watching the jurors showed me how difficult it is to reach a verdict, especially when the facts are so finely balanced.

What’s important is not so much whether you agree with this jury’s verdict, but whether you think the process is fair. At the end of this trial there are two key things the judge tells the jury before they retire to consider their verdict: the first is the importance of taking into account the other jurors’ points of view; the second is that the trial can’t reveal everything that happened between Ryan and Sophie on the night in question because of course only they were there. It’s not like an overly neat courtroom TV drama. Even though they can’t know everything, jurors must still strive to reach “a true verdict according to the evidence”. I hope that by the time you finish watching this series you’re as passionate about defending the right to trial by jury as I am.

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