Britain’s secretive, Kafkaesque conveyor-belt courts - spiked

Oct 20, 2024

Tristan Kirk on how the ‘single-justice procedure’ makes a mockery of open justice.

Open justice is usually thought of as a fundamental right in a free, liberal society. Yet in England and Wales, hundreds of thousands of criminal cases are heard each year behind closed doors, and are adjudicated on by a single magistrate. This is thanks to the so-called single-justice procedure, which was established to dispense justice more ‘efficiently’ for low-level crimes. In practice, the secrecy and the speed of these trials are a recipe for injustice.

Tristan Kirk – courts correspondent at the Standard – has uncovered numerous miscarriages of justice under the single-justice procedure. His investigations have exposed a form of ‘conveyor-belt’ justice, where magistrates decide cases in mere minutes, often overlooking or ignoring key mitigating evidence. It is a process so secretive that some defendants have been tried and convicted even without their knowledge. Kirk’s work on the single-justice procedure won him this year’s Paul Foot Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism. spiked caught up with him to learn more about this threat to justice.

spiked: What is the single-justice procedure?

Tristan Kirk: The single-justice procedure is a court process that was introduced in 2015. It allows for a single magistrate to sit and adjudicate on criminal cases behind closed doors, in a private session, based on written evidence alone. For context, before it was brought in, these kinds of cases would have been dealt with in open court with a prosecutor present. They would have potentially included the defendant, with two or three magistrates rather than one, and they would have been open sessions. Anyone could come along and watch what was going on.

The single-justice procedure is a different process. It deals with something like 800,000 cases each year, and these are all low-level crimes and minor offences. To qualify for the single-justice procedure, they have to be ‘non-imprisonable’, so the maximum penalty can only be up to a fine. They can’t be something like assault or robbery. They have to be ‘victimless’. And finally, they are ‘summary only’, meaning they can only be dealt with in the Magistrates’ Court. As a result, they all tend to deal with things like speeding, traffic violations, not paying a TV licence, or failing to have your car insured. The single-justice procedure has been running for almost a decade and there are significant concerns about the way that it operates, and the way that magistrates are being asked to work under it.

spiked: What are some of the most egregious examples of its flaws that you’ve uncovered?

Kirk: Firstly, we have a number of cases where people are being prosecuted and convicted when they have had powerful mitigating circumstances. Yet those mitigating circumstances have not been enough to stop the prosecution. We’ve found instances of people being prosecuted who are dying from cancer, or people with severe learning difficulties. We’ve found pensioners with dementia. People who wouldn’t be able to deal with the legal process. In some cases, I’ve come across defendants who were already dead. I find cases like this every single week, which raises the question: why is this fast-track process being used? It is obviously not up to the job of identifying the cases which should and shouldn’t be prosecuted in the first place.

When the Covid restrictions were announced in 2020, that was necessarily going to involve quite a lot of people being accused of crimes and taken to court – so the government decided to use the single-justice procedure. Now, at that point, there were already significant concerns about the procedure, particularly around transparency. But there were also concerns that magistrates were using it as a sort of ‘conveyor belt of justice’, where not enough time and consideration were being spent on each individual case.

Now, if you’re talking about speeding, the idea of conveyor-belt justice chimes with people. But with Covid restrictions, I think we can all agree they had a few unusual features about them. These regulations were complex, and so there should have been a requirement for courts to consider the relevant crimes carefully. Yet these restrictions were put into a system that was designed for cost-cutting, speed and a lack of consideration about whether people were truly guilty.

If you’re going to impose rules on people, one of the things you have to do is be really clear about what they are. You also have to openly show the public the consequences for breaking the rules. So it was just remarkable to me that the government put almost all of the Covid-restriction prosecutions through the single-justice procedure, which they knew had issues regarding the lack of transparency. It was really hard for journalists and the public to actually get any information about the process.

Finally, the single-justice procedure’s deepest flaw is that whereas in open court you have magistrates, legal advisers, prosecutors and somebody representing the defendant, the single-justice procedure does not appoint a prosecutor to see the letters of mitigation that come back. There are a lot of people pleading guilty and then sending in a letter saying: ‘I’ve just lost a member of my family and I’m in mourning.’ Some are even sending in letters on behalf of their relatives, saying ‘This person is now in a care home’, ‘they are in a coma’, or ‘they are incapacitated.’ But the prosecutor has essentially disappeared from the process, so they don’t see the letters. This is despite the fact that they’re the only ones who can withdraw these cases if they’re not in the public interest.

spiked: Do you think that there’s a danger of the single-justice procedure being expanded in the future?

Kirk: When the single-justice procedure started, it was for low-level crimes. But come 2020, Covid-related crimes were put through it. That’s a perfect demonstration of the way, in theory, it can be expanded beyond its original intention. It may be possible, for example, for some of the new lower-level protest laws to be put through the single-justice procedure, because they are victimless, non-imprisonable and summary only. It hasn’t happened yet, I want to stress, but the door is open for this system to be expanded.

One of the reasons that I continue to report on it is because the Ministry of Justice keeps saying that the single-justice procedure is working well and as it should be. It keeps saying tremendously positive things about this system, and that’s exactly how you lay the groundwork for expanding it. So I was determined to make sure that people were aware that it isn’t working brilliantly, and if it is not scrapped, it at least needs significant reform.

Tristan Kirk was speaking to Rosie Norman.

Picture by: Getty.

To enquire about republishing spiked’s content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.