Mistrial by jury

Hugely-expensive court cases are collapsing in Britain because jurors are doing their own private research - including trawling the internet for information on the person accused. This is despite the judges warning them not to.

The person on trial, who has gone through months of anxiety and nail-biting waiting for the case to start, has to wait all over again after the judge is forced to end the case and order a retrial at a later date.

The case against an 18 year old man charged with murdering a 71 year old cabbie had to be abandoned at Newcastle. And in London the trial of a celebrity's nanny accused of child cruelty was also abruptly dropped.

In Newcastle the juror had actually gone to the death scene, taken photos and done research into his own theories about what happened on the night in question. And then discussed his ideas with other jurors.

I can understand a juror's temptation to make their own inquiries into things they're not clear about. I did jury service twice in London and there were often things that were puzzling or confusing, or even totally unbelievable.

But the whole point of a court case is that the jury makes a decision based on what they've been told in court - which hopefully is rigorously tested for bias or lies. If jurors start doing their own digging, they'll come across all sorts of dubious rumours and anecdotes which can seriously slant their decision.

If I was accused of something and I thought the jurors were busy sniffing around on their own I'd be horrified.

Unfortunately the internet makes it all too easy to find information about people at the click of a mouse. And nobody even knows you're doing it unless you're careless enough to tell someone.

In the end, you can only trust people to take the job of deciding a person's guilt or innocence seriously and not deliberately put a spanner in the works. Happily from my own experience, most jurors seem extremely conscientious about holding someone else's fate in their hands.