Ielts Writing Task 2 Please help me review and mark

Under British and Australian laws a jury in a criminal case has no access to information about the defendant’s past criminal record. This protects the person who the person who is being accused of the crime.

Some lawyers have suggested that this practice should be changed and that a jury should be given all the past facts before they reach their decision.

Under the common law system, data about the defendant’s crime history could not be revealed to a jury in a criminal case to secure the suspect. Nevertheless, some legal practitioners oppose to this policy and demand the tribunal’s access all the past facts. I completely disagree with this view, and will give my reasons below.

A jury is likely to make biased decisions when he is made aware of the prior convictions of the accused. If a person is charged with the crime he committed earlier, the judge may have the notion of his backsliding. One example is the famous case called “Hong Son” in my country. The defendant named Hong Son was found guilty of raping a girl in 1999 and sentenced to prisons. When he was released in 2005, he was prosecuted of the same crime while indeed he was not responsible for it. After serious investigation, the faulty was mainly attributable to the jury’s inference of the suspect’s guilt based on his previous misdeeds.

Another drawback of disclosing criminal history of the respondents is that the third parties might capitalize on it. The rival lawyers, the media, etc. could make use of the revealed information to disfigure the images of the litigants at trial. The defendants, as a result, would prone to hate from the public or mental depression even if they are not prosecuted at the end.

In conclusion, despite helping the jury reach the decisions more easily in a case, divulging the past criminal record would lead to the preconception in judgment and damage to the accused in case their information is misused by the opposing groups.

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