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Our courts of law are looking to join the Post-PC revolution and save money, trialling the use of tablets instead of paper in court. The HP-supplied tablets will save in the region of £50m if rolled out. Let’s just hope they’re a little more powerful than the TouchPad — you wouldn’t want to get banged up just because the Defence’s tablet locked-up.
The whole of the Crown Prosecution Service across England and Wales will look to roll out the tablets from April next year, but first they have to be put through their paces. Norwich Crown Court is to hold a mock trial to test out 35 of the whizz-bang tablets. They’ll also be used in less serious cases brought into Magistrates’ Courts. The eventual plan is to get judges, jurors, and barristers using them, removing all need for paper evidence in the courts.
It’s hoped that not just the courts will be freed from mountains of paper — the Rozzers should be able to submit evidence electronically too, in theory, saving them from paperwork.
The moves come as the CPS faces funding cuts of 25 per cent over three years. Let’s just hope that moving to electronic, and knowing HP probably Windows based, tablets for evidence storage and presentation doesn’t leave it open to hacking attacks. It’d be a disaster to see someone sent down wrongly, just because some hacker had it in for them. Although I could see it being useful for wrongly prosecuting some of the more irritating people in the public eye — here’s looking at you Bob Crow. [The Guardian]
Image credit: A judge from Shutterstock
I work in a place where council members have swapped paper for iPads. It makes a world of difference, and pays for itself eventually with the amount of paper saved.
I went without printing paper for my PhD, read papers only on-screen and on my iPad. Worked pretty well, a lot better than printing out hundreds of journal articles; each one is at least a couple of pages, some up to about 50. I don’t know whether it was better for the environment, but it avoided me getting a hell of a lot of paper cuts.
stupid idea!
I visited the Supreme Court earlier this year to watch a bit of a criminal case. Lord Philips, the President of the SC was sat there tapping away on his MacBook Pro throughout the entire proceedings. Makes a lot of sense I think but I’m not sure whether e-bundles would be very popular. I know a barrister who can’t figure out PowerPoint (he puts the title on the title slide and then pastes all the content into the presenter notes and scrolls through them in presenter view).