Indeed, time appears to slow down in the courts. There is no such thing as punctuality. Nobody questions a 15-minute pause in proceedings stretching into 30 minutes or an hour. Cases often get going late in the morning and break for the night in the mid-afternoon.
Despite the need to reduce the case backlog, more than a fifth of courtrooms sit vacant each day due to organizational, maintenance and personnel issues. Jurors and dock officers fall asleep in public view. Hold-ups and mistakes that leave victims and defendants waiting extra weeks or months for justice are the accepted norm.
One ambitious starter, observing court at the beginning of her Crown Prosecution Service career, says the system is rife with “mismanagement,” sighing: “By the end of day two, I thought: Now I understand the backlogs.”
POLITICO spent a week visiting England’s Crown Courts, speaking to dozens of barristers, judges, clerks, probation staff, defendants and their families, to understand how a best-in-class justice machine came to be broken, and whether it can be fixed.
Wondering when justice might begin
A defense barrister lets out a deep sigh as she contemplates another wasted day at Isleworth Crown Court in west London.
The defendant in her morning hearing, an attempted strangulation case, failed to show up — she thinks because he was never told about the court date — and the defendant in her afternoon hearing is nowhere to be found either.