An Outsider's View of the Criminal Justice System
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Published date | 01 January 1994 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1994.tb01918.x |
| Author | W.G. Runciman |
THE
MODERN
LAW REVIEW
Volume
57
January
1994
No.
1
An Outsider’s View
of
the Criminal Justice System
W.
G.
Runciman
*
Some of you may already know the story of the German manager sent over to take
charge of an engineering company in England who is advised to be friendly and
make himself personally known to the workforce. On his first day he goes down
early onto the shopfloor and says in his impeccable English to the first two men he
sees at their bench, ‘Good morning.
Do
you know who I am?’ Neither responds,
but after a short pause one looks up at the other and says, ‘Bert, there’s a bloke ’ere
as doesn’t know
’00
’e
is.’
That,
I
must tell you, is exactly how I was made to feel in the early months
following the establishment of the Royal Commission as I went round with my
colleagues visiting courts, police stations, forensic laboratories, prosecutors’
offices, barristers’ chambers and prisons. At the time that I accepted the surprising
invitation to chair the Commission, I knew next to nothing about the criminal
justice system. I’d never heard of a green form, I thought there were still things
called assizes,
I
imagined the word ‘committal’ meant being sent to prison,
I
had
no idea that to ask jurors why they had reached the verdict they did was contempt
of court, and when I heard the phrase ‘Baskerville corroboration’
I
thought it must
be a concept derived from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
But that, of course, was why
I
was chosen. In our quaint British way,
we
assume
that an enquiry of this nature is better headed by someone too ignorant to be
prejudiced than by someone too knowledgeable to be open-minded. I had, it was
true, peripheral experience of one small corner of the field as a director and latterly
joint deputy chairman of the Securities and Investments Board. That body, as I’m
sure you know, is responsible for the regulation of investment business and as I
hope you also know has an enforcement division which has been very effective
within the area where its writ runs. But there, too, the same principle had been
applied: when the Governor of the Bank of England approached me, he made it
quite explicit that
I
was being asked because
I
knew next to nothing about the
workings of the financial markets.
So
my title is neither flippant nor fanciful.
Whether the choice of a complete outsider was wise is obviously not for me to say.
But the view I shall be presenting to you is as near as that of the proverbial Martian
anthropologist as those who appointed me could well have asked for.
But that’s not quite right either, because of course
I
brought with me a bundle of
preconceptions derived from my upbringing, or my schoolteachers, or the media,
or wherever we do all derive our preconceptions about institutions in our own
*The
text
of
the 22nd Chorley Lecture, delivered at the London School
of
Economics and Political Science,
3
November 1993. Lord Runciman was Chairman
of
the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice 1991
-
93.
@
The Modern Law Review Limited
1994
(MLR
57:
I,
January).
Published by Blackwell Publishers.
108
Cowley
Road,
Oxford
OX4
IJF
and
238
Main
Street,
Cambridge, MA
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USA.
1
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