‘Split Verdicts’ in Scotland: A Judicial Survey
(2010) 14/2 Edinburgh Law Review 225-235
Posted: 14 Oct 2020
Date Written: April 1, 2010
Abstract
This article sketches the results of a modest study undertaken to determine the extent to which Scottish judges disagree with jury verdicts of guilty. The central finding is that only 18 out of 109 judges, who together had presided over some 16,500 trials, reported that they had presided over a trial in which the jury voted to convict someone whom they would not themselves have convicted. After setting out the purposes and methodology of the survey (part A), the article briefly describes the Scottish court and jury system (part B), including three of its peculiarities: the requirement of corroboration (incriminating evidence from two independent sources), the availability of the “not proven” verdict in addition to “guilty” and “not guilty”, and the use of a fifteen-member jury with majority voting. The next section (part C) summarises the judges’ responses and explains why a few were excluded from the study. The article ends (part …
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