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    Did anyone see "The Jury - Murder Trial?" 📂 Archived Message

    Posted by RaskolnikovX on September 8, 2025, 7:05 am

    It was the second such program where they take a real court case, have actors play the briefs, accused, etc. and then have a bunch of real people (apparently, although there are some actors in there too it seems) act as a jury but film their "deliberations". They had the tagline/intro "Can we trust our jury system?" and acted as if it was some half-way reasonable sociological experiment.

    The second outing, the most recent one, was dreadful from as TV and the sociological content was non-existent. They had one or two lines of testimony then would cut to the jury room and show people arguing about stupid stuff that's not related to the evidence and basically it turned into a really shit Big Brother Crown Court edition. In total they must have shown maybe twenty to thirty minutes of evidence, if that, over about 180 minutes of total airtime and the rest was given over to the drama and the arguing.

    But the timing of all this was rather convenient; just when the government are trying to reduce trials by jury via various means. The "point" of the show was apparently to show how bad jury deliberations must be if you can actually see inside the jury room and it occured to me that they were trying to soften people up for doing away with them altogether. They've been arguing for this for a long time on rape cases and they had a test period where juries were replaced with judges/legal professionals/professional jurors/experts but that was ended quietly and I've struggled to find out what went on with it.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20n3rjp7v9o

    Anyway, I thought it was very snide propaganda and was interested if anyone else saw it.

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