Under British and Australian laws a jury in a criminal case has

no access to information about the defendant’s past criminal

record. This protects the person who is being accused of the
crime.
Some lawyers have suggested that this practice should be
changed and that a jury should be given all the past facts
before they reach their decision about the case

Do you agree or disagree?

Whether juries in criminal cases should have access to the defendant’s

past record is a complex and apparently divisive question. The British
and Australian judicial systems seem to subscribe to the old adage that
a person is ‘innocent until proven guilty’, by offering a defendant some
protection against their past. Lawyers who recommend a change to
this law should be wary of over-burdening juries and of under-valuing
the rehabilitative processes of the law. It appears to me that a
dangerous ramification of such a change would be overcrowded
prisons full of innocent people.

The judicial system employs juries to decide the fate of a defendant in

a specific case. Comprised of ordinary members of the public, juries
have enormous responsibilities. Apart from the obvious pressure of
making the correct decision, they are often expected to understand
and interpret complicated information presented in sometimes
unfamiliar or technical language. To increase their workload by
introducing evidence of previous crimes may interfere with the jury’s
ability to see the facts clearly on the given case. It may be that they
make their decision based on the defendant’s past rather than on the
facts at hand. This could lead to innocent people being convicted.

Every defendant has the right to a fair trial, regardless of past

misdemeanors. Those with a criminal past have often undergone some
form of rehabilitation. This re-education, often carried out in prison by
experts in psychology, sociology and other related fields, aims at
correcting behavior considered dangerous and subversive. In Australia,
a strong emphasis is placed on the rehabilitation of the criminal and it
would seem that it gives some chance of assimilating back into society
without re-offending.
We cannot simplify this problem by saying “once a criminal, always a
criminal”. They must be treated as any other person in society. What if,
through no fault of their own, they are implicated in a crime and,
because their past record is admitted in court, the jury judges their
character to be bad and they are wrongly convicted. The possibility of
such mistakes occurring would be increased greatly if past criminal
records are permitted. Each case should be judged independently on
evidence and circumstances directly related to it, if we are to avoid
innocent people going to jail.

To sum up, it would appear that British and Australian laws take a
more compassionate view when judging criminal cases involving
defendants with a prior record. This may be due to the confidence their
legal systems have in the process of rehabilitation. To my way of
thinking, the current system operates to best ensure a fair trial for all.