Are you or have you ever been a Magistrate in the UK?
June 26, 2015 9:45 AM Subscribe
Are you or have you ever been a Magistrate in the UK? If so, can you tell me what it is like?
I feel like it's something I might like to look into doing, and I'd love to hear some first-hand accounts if we have any here.
I'm particularly interested in how much time you commit to it, yearly or monthly, and how receptive your employer was to giving you that time off?
A little sub-point for bonus points - I imagine you might hear somewhat harrowing cases at times. Is it as emotionally battering as it's possible to imagine it could be?
I feel like it's something I might like to look into doing, and I'd love to hear some first-hand accounts if we have any here.
I'm particularly interested in how much time you commit to it, yearly or monthly, and how receptive your employer was to giving you that time off?
A little sub-point for bonus points - I imagine you might hear somewhat harrowing cases at times. Is it as emotionally battering as it's possible to imagine it could be?
I am not a magistrate, but I work in the criminal justice system. You need to be able to commit at least 13 days, or 26 half days, a year (by which I mean weekdays rather than any day). There are also 3 days' worth of training on top of that before you start and regular additional training to keep up with changes in the law.
Magistrates deal with a very wide range of cases. At one end of the spectrum you have things like traffic courts where people have pleaded by post and you are just rubber stamping lots of fines. At the other end you might be making decisions about whether to send a prolific offender who has been in care, is a drug addict or has been let down by every agency they have encountered to prison for up to 6 months (the current maximum power of imprisonment that magistrates have). Or you might be making decisions about whether a child can be adopted or should be taken into care. For criminal cases you may get frustrated that your role is ultimately one of punishment: while the sentences you can impose involve rehabilitation too, you are seeing the result of failure of the system in many cases and you cannot fix that. You are legally bound to follow sentencing guidelines and your discretion is relatively limited in many cases. On the other hand, you will get incredibly positive moments such as agreeing adoption for parents who are desperate to care for a child.
In short, you will get all the extremes as well as the churn of everyday cases in the middle.
There are some good blogs by serving magistrates that will give you a flavour of what it is like: try here and here for starters.
posted by greycap at 10:07 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
Magistrates deal with a very wide range of cases. At one end of the spectrum you have things like traffic courts where people have pleaded by post and you are just rubber stamping lots of fines. At the other end you might be making decisions about whether to send a prolific offender who has been in care, is a drug addict or has been let down by every agency they have encountered to prison for up to 6 months (the current maximum power of imprisonment that magistrates have). Or you might be making decisions about whether a child can be adopted or should be taken into care. For criminal cases you may get frustrated that your role is ultimately one of punishment: while the sentences you can impose involve rehabilitation too, you are seeing the result of failure of the system in many cases and you cannot fix that. You are legally bound to follow sentencing guidelines and your discretion is relatively limited in many cases. On the other hand, you will get incredibly positive moments such as agreeing adoption for parents who are desperate to care for a child.
In short, you will get all the extremes as well as the churn of everyday cases in the middle.
There are some good blogs by serving magistrates that will give you a flavour of what it is like: try here and here for starters.
posted by greycap at 10:07 AM on June 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
To add that another good way of getting a feel for it is to turn up at your local magistrates' court for a day or half a day and just sit in the public gallery. Find a member of court staff and tell them you're interested in getting a cross-section of what magistrates do, and you are likely to find a selection of trials, sentencing hearings for guilty pleas, civil and family proceedings, and administrative hearings such as working through speeding fines or dealing with enforcement of unpaid fines.
posted by greycap at 10:16 AM on June 26, 2015
posted by greycap at 10:16 AM on June 26, 2015
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posted by grouse at 10:03 AM on June 26, 2015