Aamer Anwar

Last week, Ms Sturgeon claimed that even before “the ink was dry on the draft legislation and without a single word of debate… fixed positions had been staked” in the debate over the proposed pilot.

Writing in the Scottish Daily Express, Mr Anwar states: “The reality is entirely different, there has been little or no consultation other than with selected victim’s groups, as for the ‘ink drying’ it wasn’t so long ago that Nicola’s government attempted to abolish jury trials. Just one week into ‘Lockdown’ the Scottish Parliament was being asked by her then Justice Minister Humza Yousaf to abolish juries as a solution to the backlog of criminal cases.

He adds that “if the Scottish government wants us to shut us up because of the views of one senior judge [Lady Dorrian], what about the rest of them? Lord Hope, one of Scotland’s most respected legal figures, who served as deputy president of the UK Supreme Court, has asked whether judges will be removed from juryless rape courts if they failed to deliver high enough conviction rates. Lord Uist, another highly experienced legal figure, went much further accusing the government of ‘treating the courts as forensic laboratories in which to experiment with their policies’”.

He concludes: “No law book can give our judges the lived experience of a jury of 15 ordinary men and women coming together, from diverse backgrounds, delivering justice irrespective of education, wealth or status. Fifteen heads will always be much better than one ‘case hardened’ judge selected from the most socially exclusive profession in the United Kingdom.”