In the 80 years since the first Courts of Justice Bill went through the young Irish parliament, crime has both increased and changed a lot. Yet the structure for dealing with crime in the courts has remained essentially the same, having three layers of the court system to deal with criminal offences, and the right of appeal to a fourth layer, the Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeal.
This system provides for minor offences to be tried summarily, that is, by a judge alone, in the District Court. More serious offences are tried in the Circuit Court. The Central Criminal Court has exclusive jurisdiction for crimes like treason and murder. More recently it was also given exclusive jurisdiction to deal with rape. The non-jury Special Criminal Court was set up to deal with subversive crime, though it has been increasingly used to deal with other serious crime, like drug-dealing and murders by criminal gangs.
Over the past 80 years the number of murders committed annually has increased dramatically, as has the number of rapes, and the number of rapes reported to the authorities. New crimes linked to illegal business activities have come on the statute books. As criminal law has become more complex there are frequent legal challenges to evidence, leading to debates in the absence of juries and further delays in cases reaching conclusion.
All this has put pressure on the court system, and produced anomalies, like the fact that very serious fraud cases must be tried in the Circuit Court, while violent and sexual crimes of little legal complexity, and where the accused pleads guilty, must be tried in the Central Criminal Court, a division of the High Court.
The report of the Working Group on the Jurisdiction of Courts has made a number of proposals to deal with these and other problems. On the whole they are conservative, and leave the architecture of the system intact - it does not recommend a central Criminal Court system, as promised in the Programme for Government, but rather the retention of the Circuit Court, extending its jurisdiction to rapes and murders, and allowing the Central Criminal Court deal with competition crime. It also proposes pre-trial procedures to reduce the number of legal challenges and make the running of cases more streamlined.
It criticises the tendency of the legislature in recent years to reduce access to jury trial, by allowing the DPP to recommend a summary trial for a wide range of minor offences, and recommends that the right of the accused to opt for jury trial be restored. Although the DPP registered a dissent from this proposal, its inclusion in the report rightly underlines the importance of this fundamental principle of our legal system.
The 248-page report makes cogent arguments for its recommendations, and they deserve to be incorporated into any proposals for reform of the court system that will now come forward from the Minister for Justice. He has promised the proposals speedy consideration, and it is to be hoped they will soon find legislative form.