Under British and Australian laws a jury in a criminal case has no access to information about the defendant's past criminal record. This protects the person who is being accused of the crime. Some lawyers have suggested that this practice should be changed and that a jury should be given all the past facts before they reach their decision about the case . Do you agree or disagree? Give reasons for your answers.

Essay topic: 

Under British and Australian laws a jury in a criminal case has no access to information about the defendant's past criminal record. This protects the person who is being accused of the crime.

Some lawyers have suggested that this practice should be changed and that a jury should be given all the past facts before they reach their decision about the case .

Do you agree or disagree? Give reasons for your answers.

Deeds in criminal case have achieved reputation as the most complicated ones. In Britain and Australia this case is even more impeded by the question of acquaintance of a jury by previous criminal actions of a defendant. Some lawyers suggested that jury should be informed of the previous cases. However, the accused person is defended from such kind of practice by the law of those countries. In my opinion, this question requires more careful consideration.

Initially, the practice of informing the jury of the criminal past of the accused prevents objective evaluation of the whole situation. Jury members could begin to think a bit stereotyped. For instance, if person was guilty of killing or maiming, the jury may consider that he or she is able to do this again. However, they may not take into account such facts that the defendant perpetrated this being in an affect or in order to defend himself. Hence, the verdict of the jury seems to be incorrect. However, previous crime records might help jury to identify the features of the person in the bar, and compare them with presented facts.

On the other hand, when the jury is not given the facts of past criminal record, they could not prefigure the whole responsibility of their decision. The accused may be recognized as guiltless. For example, high qualified lawyers are able to use loopholes in the laws to liberate their clients, even if defendant is guilty. Moreover, people who did many offenses in the past may look innocent. Therefore, the jury seems to be misled by the current position.

Given the evidence, the jury should only be given information of the accused person who was brought to trial many times. Therefore, this practice should be used according to the crime situation.

Full essay evaluations

Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 7.5 out of 9
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 18 15
No. of Words: 296 350
No. of Characters: 1421 1500
No. of Different Words: 156 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.148 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.801 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.566 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 98 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 84 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 58 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 30 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 16.444 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 6.474 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.667 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.31 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.489 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.063 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5