How the SFO is making evidence easier for juries to understand
Here at the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) we investigate the most serious and complex cases of economic crime. We track criminal activity across the world and gather millions of pieces of evidence which we painstakingly put together to crack the case. In one case alone last year we gathered around 20 million documents.
But cracking the case is not enough. That is only half of our work. When the case goes to court, we need to prove the crime to the jury. Training and years of experience in analysing complex financial evidence make it easy for us to know that a fraud has taken place. However, we know that it's not so straightforward for members of the public who find themselves sitting on a jury in an economic crime case. They potentially face weeks and weeks of evidence and legal arguments over issues they are not necessarily familiar with. We also know that we owe it to the victims of the crime to present our evidence in the most compelling way.
So how do we go about this? Our Electronic Presentation of Evidence team - EPE for short - is the answer. This small team has two main roles:
- preparing and serving the evidence electronically
- using special software to display the evidence in court.
Deciding whether to use EPE
Experience has shown us that EPE is most effective in cases where:
- the trial is expected to last at least four weeks
- the defendants have indicated they will plead not guilty
- there are at least 4000 pages of evidence.
But we do consider EPE in other cases which we think might benefit from it.
The benefits of using EPE
EPE offers a number of benefits, not least value for money, as you can see from the list below.
- It makes lengthy, complex trials with lots of documentary evidence, more interesting.
- The evidence is easier to follow and understand.
- The evidence is displayed instantaneously to everyone. This is not only quicker but it also means that everyone is looking at the same section or page of a document at the same time. It takes just two seconds to display an image on screen compared to 90 seconds for an average member of a jury to locate a page or passage in a paper file.
- It cuts court time and SFO time by anything from 20 to 35 per cent, which means value for money for the taxpayer and less time in court for the jurors.
- Lawyers can annotate the display to help juries further.
Judge for yourself
Judges and lawyers have already given us their views on EPE. Graphics is one of the most powerful presentational tools we have. Judges and lawyers who can understand and use them effectively are great advocates of EPE. But defence teams are less enthusiastic as good graphics can cause them huge problems. One defence lawyer once told us that his client's case was really quite good until the graphics were served.
But judge for yourself! The graphics below come from our prosecution of Prudential Commercial Investments. They show how money and suspects had been moved around. If you were sitting on the jury, what would you have preferred to do - look through pages of flight bookings to work out who flew where and when, or look at a summary on screen?
