William Roscoe showed great moral courage in speaking out against the slave trade, one of the great injustices of his day, and I hope that he would have approved of the theme of this lecture which is not intended to show moral courage but rather to raise issues about how our approach to criminal justice should be fashioned for the 21st century, issues which I believe each one of us, as members of our society, should be prepared to consider and think about, particularly as we address all the changes that we have experienced including those which follow the increased use of technology and the far greater public awareness of what is going on, all now in the context of enormous fiscal pressure, or simple lack of money.
I have been involved in the criminal justice system as a barrister and judge for 40 years and I have no doubt that it is a system that we can be – and should be – proud of. Our pride, however, does not mean that the system cannot or should not change; neither does it mean that it cannot improve. So this evening, I would like to explain why I am proud of our approach to criminal justice but also to ask some questions about what we want a future criminal justice system to look like. Justice is, of course, sacrosanct but it is all too easy to say things should stay the same. But society is not the same as it was, change occurs in every area of our lives. We therefore always need to be looking for improvement and in these times of very real shortage of public funding, we need to be particularly aware of the cost implications of the system that we take forward.
