TRIAL BY FURY.

• Author: Searls, Helen
• Position: Radical legal theory from America is destroying civil liberties in Great Britain

How radical legal theory from America is destroying civil liberties in Great Britain.

Something strange is happening to British justice. In recent months the British government has unveiled an array of measures that promise to change the legal system profoundly. This spring, British citizens learned that Jack Straw, the home secretary (the rough equivalent of the American attorney general, though with more political power), plans to abolish trial by jury for all but the most serious crimes. He is also considering lifting the rule against double jeopardy, which prevents a defendant from being tried more than once for the same crime, and is thinking of criminalizing offensive language even when it is spoken in the privacy of one's home.

Some in the British news media have treated these announcements as an aberration. Surely, they ask, these are not normal measures for a Labour government. The BBC was quick to remind audiences that the idea of abolishing trial by jury was first floated by the last Conservative home secretary, Michael Howard, three years ago in a rousing speech to his party's faithful. Maybe Straw's promises are an attempt by the new Labour government to woo elusive middle England voters - traditional middle-class Tory voters - from rural and suburban areas? But with the Tories still trailing abysmally in the polls, it is hard to see what Jack Straw has to fear from middle England.

To make sense of what is happening to the British legal system, it is necessary to look beyond middle England and peer into the depths of New Labour's thinking and practice. The truth is that Jack Straw is very much in his party's mainstream when he talks about reforming fundamental aspects of British law. He has told Parliament that he expects most of these measures to be law by the end of 1999. While it is not certain that all his proposals will reach the statute books, the entire Cabinet shares Straw's enthusiasm for reform. His plans are indicative of a new approach to the law, one influenced by radical legal thinking imported from the United States. As a result, some of the key principles on which the law has stood for centuries, principles aimed at protecting individuals from trespasses by the state, are being challenged.

The impulse behind the current wave of reform comes from the findings of a high-profile inquiry into the London Metropolitan Police Force, published last spring. In 1993, a young black man named Stephen Lawrence was brutally murdered by racists in the streets of South East London. Although there were five prime suspects, nobody was convicted, and the case remained officially unsolved. Gradually, the belief grew that the inability to secure a conviction was due to racist attitudes within the police force.

For the next few years, Stephen Lawrence's parents demanded that somebody investigate why the police had proved to be so incompetent. But not until Labour came into power in 1997 did the authorities take their demands seriously. Jack Straw set up a full public inquiry into the affair.

Although formally independent, this inquiry had the blessing and backing of Labour from its inception. In the way that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was regularly linked to the GOP in the public imagination here, so the Lawrence investigation was seen by many in Britain as a political initiative by Labour. Unsurprisingly, when the investigators finally published their findings in The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (www.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/4262.htm) - commonly known as the Macpherson report, after the chair of the team, retired judge Sir William Macpherson - the government took the unusual step of agreeing to implement all 70 of its recommendations.

After months of hearing detailed evidence, Macpherson and his three-man investigative team concluded that the London police were indeed guilty of institutional racism. No inquiry had ever been so critical. The report sent a shock wave across the nation. Newspaper headlines screamed of a "police force disgraced and a nation shamed."...