The Courts

There are times when you ask questions and you get a result and then ignore it.  Then a little while later you find that the answer was a little but more than you were asking for.  Then you ask another question, review a previous request, and suddenly you have a whole bunch more questions.  This is definitely that.  I work with the courts a lot.  As a result, i’ve picked up a bit of legal stuff - due to the nature of my job - and it started me thinking.  What sort of things can we find out about the courts.

Firstly, the AMAZING radio series called ‘Law in Action’ (Legal issues for the layman).  Ages back, it talked about how civilians can get Court Martialed if they are in a military base.  If you think about it, it stand to reason.  You are a guest of the military and as a result have to live by the laws of the military.  SO I asked the Ministry of Defence the question:

‘Please can you tell me how many non military personnel have received a court martial in the last ten years’

Got the answer, looked at it, and thought nothing more of it.

Then a little while later, whilst thinking of new ideas, I thought ‘let’s ask the Ministry of Justice how many writs of Habeas Corpus (for those of you that do not know, it literally means bring me the body - it's used to check on someone's detention).  I go an answer and thought nothing more of it.

Then I went back to them and had a little read through…  And found a but more than I bargained for.  The reasons I say this is because both of them basically said that I can find the information elsewhere and referred me to their respective locations (Court Martial here, Habeas Corpus here).  

The Court martial one gave EVERY COURT MARTIAL TRIAL DONE LAST YEAR!  The one from Civil court showed the amount of Habeas Corpus applied (See table 3.31 column L for the total number of applications for Habeas Corpus submitted to the courts), but also gave ALL the data regarding the amount that it cost, amount of people sitting, and so on and so forth.

The amount of data on both of these is startling! You could spend month goings through each of these and find nuggets from everything (In case you are wondering, it looks at the Admiralty court, technology court, amount of claims, types of claims, successful and dismissed claims).

This is one of the time where the FoI is not needed.  If anything this is a testament to the amount of data that is published by the government, and is given freely to use. It amazing me, still, how much you can get without even sending an FoI, and how helpful Section 16 is.  There is one thing, however. There are two other request that I did not mention.  One of these is from the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom telling me that I had the wrong department, and one from the Her Majesty’s Courts and the Tribunals Service, which has yet to be answered (at time of writing).

Incidentally the amount of Habeas Corpus writs made in 2015 was 26...