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The Jury on Trial
Juries: redundant lawyers’ bauble or the last bastion — Starmer’s Labour doesn’t seem to know
Law
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Lucy Letby case suggests need for: legal aid for equal expert evidence for defence; code for experts; and facilitation of joint reports.
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Increased sentence was appropriate for false imprisonment of former partner
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Nailing the institutional culprits, ignored by Ireland’s deficient media By Irvin Muchnick In Ireland’s public square, I now ask yet again: “Why was Gibney living in Florida and who sponsored his Green Card?” The long-elusive goal of a second prosecution of at least some of George Gibney’s countless alleged sexual abuses of young swimmers now seems imminent. The next stage is whether the media in Ireland deign to take the story deeper. Custom and practice suggest the prognosis is not promising. Mark Horgan’s podcast Where Is George Gibney? did succeed in notching Gibney. Unfortunately, a lot of important stuff has been either left on the cutting-room floor or ignored entirely. Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s remarks that it was this series that got this over the top spiked decades of advocacy by, among others, swimming star Gary O’Toole and journalists Johnny Watterson and Justine McCarthy. ‘Prime Time’ had questioned Gibney in a California car-park as long ago as 2006 As a result of Horgan’s 2020 series, which was broadcast by the BBC and Second Captains, fresh faces came forward to gardaí, grounding an indictment drawn up by the Director of Public Prosecutions for 78 counts of sexual assault and one of attempted rape. In October of last year the Irish embassy in Washington, D.C., submitted an extradition request. And on 1 July this year, the one-time Olympic swimming coach was fitted for handcuffs and return, more than 30 years after his first prosecution got scuttled by now-discredited statute-of-limitations case-law. For the survivors of the newly alleged incidents, there is palpable relief. A trial will also be hygienic for the entire community of Gibney victims – some of them now dead, of whom at least one was by suicide. As the grimly cynical maxim goes, no well-connected predator meets his match without the emergence of “a live boy or a dead girl.” One live boy, Chalkie White, was a root whistleblower whose testimony now reaches back to events more than a half century ago. Almost incredibly, and in an illustration of the depraved reach of the republic of Gibneystan, another accuser of serial molestation was White’s sister Loraine Kennedy – alleging abuse when she was nine years old. I had the privilege of dining with that grand lady, in Dublin months before her 2019 death from cancer. Generally I prefer the term “predator” to “paedophile” which often gets appropriated by homophobes. But sometimes the shoe fits snugly. In my 2016-17 Freedom of Information Act case over whether Gibney’s privacy rights were outweighed by the public’s interest in cracking open his American immigration file, US federal judge Charles R Breyer delivered the defining analysis. “I have to assume”, Breyer said, “that if somebody has been charged with the types of offences that Mr Gibney has been charged with, the United States, absent other circumstances, would not grant a visa. We’re not a refuge for paedophiles”. Breyer’s utterance from the bench, in combination with the most basic artificial intelligence mashup via Google, will probably tell you more about where the Gibney narrative needs to turn in 2026 than the entirety of the mainstream Irish coverage of scandalously delayed — and so justice-denying — court proceedings. More than a decade ago, the headline over my first blog post on this sordid subject posed basic questions that remain not only unanswered but also unexplored, in both Ireland and the US. On the Irish side, this is sadly characteristic of the national style in the agonising space of historical abuse in high places. A victory lap by the Irish Times crowd always seems to replace the incommodious task of shining the klieg light of accountability on sports overseers, law enforcement and governments. In Ireland’s public square, I now ask yet again: “Why [Was] George Gibney – No. 1 At-Large Paedophile in Global Sports – Living in Florida? And Who Sponsored His Green Card?”. The BBC, Irish Times and RTÉ avoid contemplating the larger lessons and squash offshoot stories. They do not foster the investigative journalism that would generate challenging lessons In the generous interpretation, the podcast’s confinement by the parameters of its brand of storytelling precluded such a deep dive. In the less generous interpretation, the terms of engagement for underwriter BBC – like those of the Irish Times, RTÉ and many other institutions with the resources to do better – annul contemplation of how hard cases make for larger lessons. They squash offshoot stories by atomising and sentimentalising core narratives. They do not foster the investigative journalism that could render our takeaways less domesticated, more explicit and more challenging. ***** To date, the defunct alternative site Broadsheet.ie (whose archives, happily, can still be accessed), starting in 2016, and Village, starting with my piece here in 2022, remain the only Irish outlets that have shared with news consumers certain relevant facts surrounding the determining official lapse in the Gibney saga. That would be the 1994 three-justice Supreme Court technical ruling which effectively scuttled Gibney’s 27-count indictment. One of the judges was Susan Denham, later, of course, the Chief Justice. She is the sister of Patrick Gageby, who was Gibney’s barrister. Not until 2019 were Ireland’s judicial ethics guidelines reformed to say that judges should not consider cases involving close relatives. To a foreign journalist, the principle is intuitive with a capital I. It is a gloss on a Latin formulation: nemo judex in causa sua, or “no one shall be a judge in their own cause”. Yet a number of my Irish friends demur. They have tried to impress upon me that, in a country of only 5 million, where many members of the elite legal stratum inevitably know each other and some are even related, it is not so nefarious that this rule of thumb is, or until recently was, fungible. On that point, you can colour me sceptical. They further point to the protocol that barristers cannot choose the clients on whose behalf they act, if the work is within their area of expertise. In
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Judgment Day coming for AI algorithms, as shown by two recent reportsBy Michael Smith Nearly 40 years ago legal philosopher, Ronald Dworkin, postulated heroic Judge Hercules, an idealised judge with superhuman intelligence and unlimited time. Two impressive recent studies suggest the ideal remains human. Twelve British judges, five from the UK Supreme Court address the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence Twelve British judges, five of them from the UK Supreme Court, recently addressed an unsettling new Herculean colleague: artificial intelligence. Polls suggest that “judges, judicial support staff, prosecutors, and lawyers around the globe have started to use chatbots. . . to draft. . . judicial decisions, and elaborate arguments”. The judges’ conversations — gathered in a quietly momentous study presented at CHIWORK 2025 — are a rare glimpse into the judicial psyche on the eve of the machine-learning age. The tone is wary, thoughtful, sagacious, occasionally amused — and almost uniformly sceptical. The tone is wary, thoughtful, sagacious, occasionally amused — and almost uniformly sceptical The study, co-authored by researchers from Harvard, Toulouse and Maynooth University, reports how judicial perceptions of how the integration of AI into judicial systems might transform the way judges and legal professionals work. It asks a simple, existential question of lawyers: what, if anything, should AI be allowed to do in a court of law? The judges’ answers are refreshingly human. The paper highlights striking enthusiasm for AI’s efficiency gains alongside deep concern for justice’s human dimension. As background it is important to note that, in contrast to the US Supreme Court, UK Supreme Court judges typically write their judgments by themselves. One participant stated, “There’s no question that anything in a judgment that I hand down will be written by anyone other than me. My judicial assistant will do research for me and maybe give me an analysis of cases, but I will then go to the cases. Similarly, the judicial assistant might produce a chronology, but I will go to the individual documents when I’m writing the judgment”. Judges spoke with understated urgency about what separates mechanical logic from legal judgment: not just facts and rules, not a matter of pure logic, but of practical reasoning, empathy, and above all, moral responsibility: “You’re given the job, not just for intellectual ability, it’s the judgment that you can see that logic is taking you in a direction that you shouldn’t be going and you need a practical, humane result”. Several participants noted that in some types of cases, a human judge is vital to providing emotional and psychological closure, and a sense of “dignity”. You can’t, said another group, “underestimate the catharsis that there is in a trial and the importance of that for peaceful dispute resolution so that the person who loses can say…I understand why I lost”. At the highest levels of the judiciary, writing a judgment isn’t clerical. These judges speak of drafting with the care of novelists, choosing words like tools, shaping arguments to make not just a ruling, but a record of reason. One noted: “When we come out of a case, we all meet together and discuss what we think about it and why. We can’t have a room of robots doing that”. AI, for all its emotionless bluster, doesn’t yet understand the difference between language and thought. Of AI’s ability to articulate the reasoning behind a decision, “AI isn’t really undertaking that process”, one judge noted dryly. And it is prone to a particular sort of error that humans are not, namely, the invention of fictitious legal authorities. Still, the judges aren’t Luddites. They know their courts are clogged, their paperwork Sisyphean, and their resources exhausted. And so they eye the machines with guarded interest. AI could probably help with bulk administrative drudgery, it could summarise documents, flag inconsistencies, or draft plain-English versions of decisions for the public — or, where appropriate, for children. For high volume courts, the initial judgment drafting or summarising of background was considered a potential boost to efficiency and better proofreading would also be helpful. There is also potential for “small claims” and some other types of cases to be fully resolved through AI, with a possible tradeoff between efficiency and quality of judgment. Sentencing was identified as an area that AI could support, as AI could analyse the relevant background information, precedents and additional considerations and make a recommendation. There could be similar support for deciding what would qualify as a fair amount in settlement agreements (e.g. personal injury). Further, many “boring” or bulk administrative tasks were identified as areas in which AI could be beneficial. Legal research and summarisation of cases, disclosures, and bundles of documents was an area of much discussion. “It might even increase access to justice”, one remarked, “at least for the sorts of cases that never make it before a judge anyway”. Context is important. One participant noted: “It’s one thing to have cheap and cheerful AI tool to resolve a £500 dispute over a second hand car sales contract. It’s quite another if somebody’s being sent to prison or somebody’s having their children taken away from them and put into care”. AI stepping into the role of decision-maker — on questions of liberty, custody, guilt or innocence would be too much. Even if the machine were right, it would be wrong. “We want a decision, as a matter of principle, made by a human being”. That insistence is not about sentimentality—it’s about legitimacy. Law, after all, is not only a system of rules. It’s a theatre of authority. Strip away the human element, and you may win efficiency — but you lose the drama, the dignity, and perhaps the consent of the governed under the separation of powers. The Economist has built a bot to predict how the US Spreme Court will rule This is not an idle worry. Across the Atlantic, a less cautious experiment is underway. The Economist, with uncharacteristic glee, has built a bot—SCOTUSbot — to predict how the nine
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Expert witnesses and their duty to the justice system
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Calling an expert witness who is unable or unwilling to comply with their duties may also have adverse consequences in costs. The Courts can join non-party [experts and lawyers] for that purpose”
