The internet generation is not used to listening for long periods and so could be unsuitable as jurors, the Lord Chief Justice has said.

Lord Judge said that many young people are “technically proficient” and obtain “much information from the internet”.

That meant that they were “not listening, they are reading,” he said in a lecture to the University of Hertfordshire.

“One potential problem is whether, learning as they do in this way, they will be accustomed, as we were, to listening for prolonged periods.”

Even if they are able to endure hours and days of sitting listening, Lord Judge asked how long it would be before some of them asked for the information on which they have to make their decision to be provided in forms which adapt to modern technology.

By the year 2020 or 2025 that would not be technology as it is now, he added. “I cannot begin to imagine the extent of the changes which lie ahead.”

Lord Judge added that access to the internet by jurors posed another problem.

Judges now gave directions at the outset of trials to jurors directing them not to look at the internet in connection with the trial.

“We assume that the direction is accepted and obeyed, although inevitably from time to time an individual juror will disregard the direction and make his own private inquiries,” he said.

In one case, he said, there was evidence of internet use in a rape trial and the conviction was quashed.

But it would be “entirely unacceptable” to vet or check the technological equipment belonging to an individual juror to ensure the judge’s directions had not been ignored, he said.

The problem also extended to pre-trial publicity. Requiring media restraint was undermined if citizens, seeking further information beyond what was already published, could access it through the internet.

But Lord Judge said he did not have solutions to these “potential areas of difficulty and problems.”

However they should be addressed while there was time to do so, rather than wait and, as often happened, legislate in haste.

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