Lord Carloway promises further summary reform at Law Society conference

An update on a new model for case management will be published tomorrow, the Lord President has announced.

Speaking at the Law Society’s Annual Conference, Lord Carloway outlined the progress made so far on addressing inefficiencies within the summary criminal courts.

While improvements have been made, Lord Carloway pointed out that the “fundamental problem” of bringing parties together in the court building for every decision still exists.

He said: “Proposals to address these inefficiencies are contained in the proposition paper entitled ‘A new model for summary criminal court procedure’, which was published by a working group of the SCTS-led Evidence and Procedure Review in February 2017. The proposal is for all pre-trial procedures to take place by way of digital case management.

“Court hearings should only be used for contested preliminary pleas, issues and other preliminary or pre-trial applications. Strong judicial oversight of the case management process should be used to secure more agreement on evidence whenever possible. A trial diet would only be allocated once parties are ready to proceed. The citation of witnesses would be managed digitally. In some cases, in which guilty pleas are tendered, sentencing could be conducted digitally without the need for any court appearance on the part of the accused, in much the same way that pleas by letter are currently handled.”

Following discussion of the model at roadshows attended by a wide variety of professionals from the justice sphere, Lord Carloway said: “The outcome of the discussions will be published tomorrow in a further report, which, I hope, will encourage us all to seize this opportunity to bring about substantial modernisation and consequent efficiencies to summary justice in Scotland.”