And Simon Powers wants Judges to be your Judge, Jury and Executioner

Judges go under microscope
Several of the country’s top judges have been described as idiosyncratic, arrogant, inflexible and not up to the job intellectually. Nor can many run a courtroom efficiently or write timely and coherent judgments. Many lack litigation experience, meaning they come to the Bench with little idea about how to conduct a trial. Most seriously, at least two are accused of predetermining a case before hearing the evidence. The criticism comes in Judging the Judges, a survey published in today’s issue of The Independent where a group of our top barristers has been asked to rate our higher court judges.

If this is how poorly our High Court Judges rate, how much worse are the rank and file Judges that Simon Power wants to replace your right to a Jury with to ‘speed up’ the Court systems? Won’t Simon in fact be entrenching a bunch of people whose rulings could be the difference between jail time and freedom? Yes there are problems with Jury service, yes it may slow things down, but isn’t hasty ill thought out justice metted out by an unaccountable elite much worse than a slow system that hands that accountability to the public?