ludicrous judicial anachronism that needed to be removed
You could say that about the right of the jury to return a perverse verdict of not guilty – what possible lessons could 340 year old examples like Bushel’s Case have for us today with a democratically elected government and all that?
but then we get cases involving peace campaigners and environmentalists, and official secrets acts being broken, and perverse verdicts being returned, and you think “whoa, wait a minute, maybe there are lessons there after all1”
All I’m saying, is that you mess around with the tenets of constitutional law at your peril!
Right to trial by jury itself could easily be argued to be an anachronism, now we’ve lost it in “complex fraud cases” where next? what other cases don’t need a jury? Terrorist cases maybe? A jury cannot be trusted with all that sensitive secret information, and so the canker spreads…
The lessons of history are there for us to learn from!
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk&feature=related[/video]