Home Affairs Minister Kristina Moore has proposed overhauling the system – including preventing rapists and child abusers from cross-examining their victims in court.
Another section of the legislation would give prosecutors the ability to bring about a retrial in the event of a hung jury.
Last month, States Members unanimously backed the proposals in principle, which are being examined in detail by Scrutiny.
And during a Scrutiny panel hearing, the Bailiff, Sir William Bailhache, said that while changes to the criminal procedures law were long overdue, he could foresee some problems with regards to holding retrials.
He said the number of Assize trials held in the Royal Court had shot up dramatically in the last two years and that media coverage of trials would make it difficult to swear in new jurors who did not have prior knowledge of the case and the evidence they would hear.
Sir William told the panel: ‘The problem for a small jurisdiction would be quite huge if we had retrials. What we are seeing is more people have been pleading not guilty and that has continued through 2017.
‘The consequence of an onset of retrials is the whole system would start creaking. We can’t run more than one jury trial at a time at the moment – that is probably a matter of resources.
‘It is not to say it is impossible, but we would need to have more employees to run more trials.
‘The second practical issue at the moment is where the trials take place. We can’t really have an Assize trial anywhere other than the Royal Court.’
And Sir William said that the requirement for the jury to listen to the evidence impartially could be compromised in the event of a retrial due to coverage of the case.
‘The trouble is we don’t know what the result is until we receive it,’ he said. ‘If we were to say that the media can’t report any trial until the end, that would pose problems.
‘If we assume there is going to be media publicity of a trial as it goes ahead, then what are the choices if we go to a retrial?’
Sir William suggested that possible solutions would be to ‘grill all members of the jury’ to find out what they knew about the case or to delay the trial until ‘such a period of time that people had forgotten’ about it. Neither of these were suitable choices, he said.
