Lawyers are scouring the Internet for too many precedents, shedding too little light on the issue at hand, two British senior judges complained Tuesday.
Naturally, Lord Justice Roger Thomas and Justice Colman Treacy cited precedent themselves to back up their plea for simplicity _ from complaints in 1641, 1863, 1939, 1977, 1982 and, in the age of the Web, 2000 and 2001.
The reproach came in the judges' rulings on appeals from two men who had pleaded guilty to murder, but now claim they should have been convicted of lesser offenses because of their diminished responsibility at the time.
The court briskly ruled that one appellant, Kenneth Erskine, the "Stockwell Strangler" who killed seven elderly people and had a history of hearing voices, had not been competent to plead guilty and should have his conviction reduced. In the second, unrelated case, the judges said the appellant, Ryan Williams, was sane and understood the consequences of his plea, and the conviction was affirmed.
"Understandably, the advocate doing his duty by his client seeks to identify each and every case which even remotely appears to bear on the principle under consideration or which has some passing factual similarity to the one with which he is immediately concerned," they wrote, adding that they meant no criticism of the barristers who argued the case.
But the court, they said, only needs to know the precedents that established a principle.
The two judges, as their ruling suggests, are far from the only ones to complain. The perception that U.K. courts are drowning in too much, and often irrelevant, information is widespread, said Paul McGrath, of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting, which publishes the official Law Reports for England and Wales.
"I think there is a fear generally that there are too many cases out there and it is too easy for barristers and people preparing cases to find and cite an excessive number of cases," he said.
The council, founded in 1865, seeks to publish "only those cases that really matter," according to its Web site, and asserts that "too much, rather than too little is reported."
The late Justice Hugh Laddie argued in 2001 that computerized databases were making the problem worse.
"Now there is no preselection," Laddie had said. "Large numbers of decisions, good and bad, reserved and unreserved, can be accessed. It seems to me that the common law system, which places such reliance on judicial authority, stands the risk of being swamped by a torrent of material."
The justices said in Tuesday's ruling that the court must make an effort to avoid bogging down in information, saying that lawyers must be pressed to justify every citation they use.
They quoted Viscount Falkland's comment from 1641: "If it is not necessary to refer to a previous decision of the court, it is necessary not to refer to it."
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On the Net:
Court of Appeal ruling, http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2009/1425.html
Incorporated Council of Law Reporting, http://www.lawreports.co.uk
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