English Audio Request

But this is surely the point. Memory, opinion, intuition and whimsy make up the national population, 12 of whom are gathered at random whenever an English jury trial takes place. This gives the law a democratic safety net parliament doesn't have. Bring in all the laws you like, but if the spirit of the prosecution does not sit with the jury, then you cannot get a conviction; thus the jury system ultimately reflects what the British public feels is right and wrong.
Are laws brought in that criminalise acts the public feel should not be criminal? Of course. Do the police ever pursue court action too harshly, for the wrong reasons, against someone who should have been let off with a warning at a much earlier stage? I don't know. I have trusted every police officer I ever met, am grateful for their service and feel safer for their presence, but I have lived this life in the incarnation of a reasonably articulate and informed middle-class white woman. I'll come back in the next life as something else and you can ask me then. In the meantime… it's possible. The jury system has the potential, if the official rules are ignored, to set the balance straight.
If 12 random jurors were to incorrectly acquit someone because they brought their own personalities, life experience and emotions to bear – if they allowed themselves to ask questions such as "Is he really a bad person?"; "Do we want to tarnish her with that conviction?"; "Might I have done the same myself?" – then this would make the law answerable to the people in a way that politics, without daily referendums, can never be.
Of course, you wouldn't want jurors speculating their way towards a guilty verdict. I'm not suggesting we should sit there saying: "But what about his slightly creepy face?", or "Portuguese? That tells me all I need to know!"
But I believe that it is, sometimes, OK to think that someone is guilty but return a not guilty verdict. I am not allowed to say anything about the cases I witnessed as a juror – and this didn't happen anyway, because we followed instructions in the stern shadow of the court – but we can all imagine theoretical examples. An old man prosecuted after thumping a thug with his walking stick. A father prosecuted for taking "indecent photographs of a child" after snapping his own kids playing naked in the sprinkler. There are a million situations where the evidence could point to technical guilt but it would just feel wrong to bang them up.