Are judges and magistrates out of touch? Could members of the public do a better job of sentencing? Reporter James Glover was invited along with other journalists, Inland Revenue staff and teachers to sit as magistrates at Portsmouth Magistrates’ Court to hear the case of mythical defendant Bobbi Jennings.

She had been arrested and charged with theft after she took a £275 fireplace that had been left outside a house under renovation. It had been put under a tarpaulin while the owner carried out work inside the home.

In the early hours of the morning, on her way home from work, Jennings stopped outside the address, dragged the fireplace to the back of a van she had borrowed and drove off.

She then hid the fireplace under a sheet at the back of her mother’s shed. It was up to James and his fellow volunteers to decide whether she was guilty or innocent.

Here is how they got on…

It all looks so simple being a magistrate when you are sitting in the press box.

Listen to the evidence, go and discuss it and then find the defendant guilty or not guilty. Easy.

Every week there seems to be a decision made by magistrates in some part of the country to let off a serial offender or jail someone for the most minor of crimes.

The chance to have my day in court as a member of the bench was enough to get me to volunteer to attend an open day – even if it was only to be a mock trial.

When all of the witnesses had been called, the benches shuffled off to their deliberation rooms to come up with a verdict.

I thought our court-hardened panel of journalists would be the quickest to convict defendants because of the number of shifty-looking characters we have seen going through the system.

Two of us were convinced of Jennings’ guilt. The third was equally convinced she was innocent. Slowly but surely we went over the evidence together.

She had found the fireplace. Did she know she could take it? Did she know who it belonged to? Could she have done more to check whether anyone wanted it?

For 20 long minutes the two of us voting guilty picked through the case before we could convince our third member to drop his objections and agree on a guilty verdict.

Next door, members of a team from the Inland Revenue had finished their discussions well before us – and returned a guilty verdict without hesitation.

One of the Inland Revenue team, Jan Westall, said: “We came in with open minds, but she was obviously guilty.”

Although our panel agreed that Jennings was guilty, it was only when we were forced to use the law to rule on the case that we realised how difficult it could be to convict someone.

Just because the person in the dock looked suspicious wasn’t quite enough – not even for a mock court.

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