Yesterday morning I went to the County Court again - this time to hear a Personal Injury case.  I learned that in England the judge has to approve of the settlement of the solicitors concerning the amount of damages when the claim is filed on behalf of a child.

After that the barrister I had accompanied to court asked me if I would like to see a criminal case in the Crown Court. Then he helped me finding an interesting trial where the defendant was being accused of burglary. When I entered the court room, the jury was just about to be sworn in. This was of course very exciting for me because so far I had known jury trials only from American films and TV series.

After the prosecutor's pleading the first witness was called. He was a taxi-driver who worked for the company on whose premises the burglary had been committed. The questioning turned out to be very difficult as the man had a learning disability and therefore did not understand all of the questions he was asked by the prosecutor, the defence counsel and the judge.

Although the second witness was more eloquent his questioning proved to be equally difficult since he had doubts concerning the accuracy of the map of the premises which had been delivered to the jury. This led to long discussions and in the end, I did not have the impression that his statement had helped very much to find out the truth.

At this stage, the trial had already been going on for more than two hours and there were still more witnesses to be heard, so I decided to leave as my concentration was more and more in decline. Nevertheless the trial gave me a very good impression of the English criminal procedure which is much more traditional than the one in Germany.