Disabled people are being failed by a “fundamentally unfair” and secretive fast-track court system which needs to be investigated by Parliament, a new report has found. The Single Justice Procedure (SJP) was invented a decade ago in a Conservative Party-led cost-cutting drive, allowing magistrates to dish out fines for low-level crimes in private hearings instead of open court.
The SJP system now deals with more than half of all criminal cases - around 800,000-a year - and has recently been mired in controversy thanks to a long-running investigation by The Standard into its deep flawsAnd despite the emphasis, it'd not just disabled people at risk.
“The most disturbing aspect of this story is that in ten years, the system has been subject to so little official scrutiny”, the report concluded.“No parliamentary committee has looked in detail at the SJP, the government has published no social research and very little data.”
Well, of coutse not. You don't peek under the carpet when you know damn well what you've brushed under there!
Last year, the Chief Magistrate had to overturn more than 59,000 criminal convictions for rail fare evasion after it emerged that train companies had spent years bringing unlawful prosecutions through SJP.
It seems that the main cause of this is that our judges and magistrates are not bright enough to understand the system they've preusably been trained to use:
Teenagers have been unlawfully prosecuted using the SJP system, with magistrates and legally-trained court officials apparently not noticing that defendants under the age of 18 cannot be dealt with in the fast-track courts.
Anothet good reason to never agree to the removal of the jury system. These people cannot be trusted. And nor can the politicians pushing this.
4 comments:
The Single Justice System is a Star Chamber, or Kangaroo Court style of injustice, which should have been banned long ago. British justice suggests that both the prosecution and the defence each state their case before an impartial judge or magistrate. The problem with the SJS is that the accused responds to the accuser, rather than the court, with either a defence or a plea of mitigation, assuming that this will be passed to the court. That fact this is rarely, if ever, passed on, leads to the court dealing with solely guilty pleas, or no pleas at all, often with devastating results. To incorporate the word 'Justice' into this system is a mockery of a fair and impartial legal process.
No comment. Do not engage. Don't plead your case. Don't believe the Police and Duty Solicitors are your friends.
It works for murderous scumbags. Not paying rail charges? Jesus wept...
Where do you find an impartial judge or magistrate, since the training they get is geared to ensure they are nothing of the sort?
Too many people don’t really understand what’s happened to this country….
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